Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff
Wolff at Kepler's in Menlo Park, California, April 25, 2008
Born	Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (1945-06-19) June 19, 1945 (age 71) Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Occupation	Writer
Genre	memoir, short story, novel
Spouse	Catherine Dolores Spohn (m. 1975; 3 children)

Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, and novelist. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written two novels, including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and an array of short stories. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015.

Tobias Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of Rosemary (Loftus) and Arthur Samuels Wolff, an aeronautical engineer. Wolff's father was from a Jewish background, though Wolff did not discover that until he was an adult (Wolff himself is Catholic). Wolff lived with his mother in Newhalem, Washington up in the North Cascade Mountains, while his brother and father lived on the East Coast. He and his mother had drifted from place to place before she finally remarried and relocated to Newhalem. As a kid Wolff busied himself with a local paper route as well as attending Boy Scouts. After attending Concrete High School in Concrete, Washington, Wolff applied to and was accepted by The Hill School under the self-embellished name Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff III. He had forged his transcripts and recommendation letters in order to get in and was later expelled. He served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War era. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972) and an M.A. from Stanford University. In 1975, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford.

Wolff is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, where he has taught classes in English and creative writing since 1997. He also served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford from 2000 to 2002.