He published his first short story collection in 1981. While continuing to write, Wolff taught at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997. After returning to the United States, in 1975, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where he earned an M.A. He holds a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford (1972). Army from 1964 to 1968, when he trained for Special Forces, learned Vietnamese, and served as an adviser in Vietnam. When Wolff was found to have forged his transcripts and recommendation letters, he was later expelled. He had applied under the self-embellished name 'Tobias Jonathan von Ansell-Wolff III', adopting part of one of his father's personas, Saunders Ansell-Wolff 3d.

After attending Concrete High School in Concrete, also in the North Cascades, Wolff applied to and was accepted by The Hill School, located 35 miles from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Īs a child, Wolff had a local paper route and was a Boy Scout. Geoffrey knew nothing about where his brother was until he entered Princeton. His father and brother lived on the East Coast during this period. After she remarried, they lived in Newhalem, a small company town in the North Cascade Mountains, where his stepfather, Robert Thompson, worked at Seattle City Light. His parents separated when Wolff was five and his elder brother Geoffrey was twelve he lived with his mother in a variety of places, including Seattle, Washington, when he was an adolescent. (Wolff was raised and identifies as Catholic, like his mother.) The father had become Episcopalian, and Wolff did not learn about his father's Jewish roots until he was an adult.

Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, the second son of Rosemary (Loftus) from Hartford, Connecticut, and Arthur Samuels Wolff, an aeronautical engineer who was a son of a Jewish doctor and his wife. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His academic career began at Syracuse University (1982–1997) and, since 1997, he has taught at Stanford University, where he is the Ward W. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015. He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994). Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing. Wolff at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, California, 2008Ĭatherine Dolores Spohn (m.

Tobias wolff the night in question