Photo: Mark Coggins from San Francisco / CC BY 2.0 (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Tobias Wolff earns my respect through sheer honesty. This Boy's Life lays out a rough, complicated boyhood without flinching, and that kind of candor is far rarer than people think; memoir collapses into vanity the moment a writer starts flattering himself, and Wolff never does. There's a quiet symmetry to his life too, from Birmingham to teaching at Stanford, that reads like one of his own stories. The PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Malamud awards confirm what readers already feel: he's a master of the short form precisely because he trusts plain truth over decoration. I suspect his students absorbed that lesson better than any craft manual could teach.
Overview
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Tobias Wolff
- Name (Japanese)
- トバイアス・ウルフ
- Reading
- とばいあす・うるふ
- Born
- June 19, 1945 (age 80)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Gemini / Rooster
- Origin
- Birmingham, Alabama, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- novelist / writer / autobiographer / screenwriter / university teacher
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- Stanford University
Awards & achievements
- 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
- Guggenheim Fellowship
- 2006 PEN/Malamud Award
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
5. Works & records
| Category | Title | Role | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Notable work | Old School | — | |
| Notable work | This Boy's Life | — |
6. Links
Novelist — see all → · Writer — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.