Tobias Wolff
fiction writer, memoirist (b. 1945)
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. Wolff received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015.
His academic career began at Syracuse University (1982–1997). Since 1997, he has taught at Stanford University, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.
Life and career
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. His father had become Episcopalian. Wolff did not learn about his father's Jewish roots until he was an adult. Wolff was raised and identifies as Catholic, like his mother.
“Tobias Wolff” enters the record as fiction writer, memoirist (b. 1945). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Tobias, Wolff and fiction can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q495754. VIAF identifies the subject as 99001261. The Library of Congress control number is n81010525. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1945, 1989, 1994 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tobias Wolff” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.