Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff is an American novelist, memoirist, short story writer, and creative writing teacher. Over his career, he has become known for his memoirs including the 1988 published This Boy’s Life and Pharaoh’s Army which he published in 1994. He is also known for his short stories and has several collections to his name. The Barracks Thief is a novel that he published in 1984 that would go on to garner critical acclaim that would win the Faulkner/PEN Award for fiction. For his work, he was granted the presidential National Medal of Arts in 2015.Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1945 and was the son of aeronautical engineer Arthur Samuels Wolff and Hartford Connecticut native Rosemary Loftus. By the time he was born his Jewish father was a full-blown Episcopalian and it was not until he was a full-grown adult that he came to learn of the Jewish roots of his father. Since he was brought up Catholic, he continues to identify as that even after he came to know of his Jewish legacy. When Wolff was just five years old, his parents separated and together with Geoffrey his twelve-year-old brother, he became the son of a single mother. Together with their mother, Wolff lived in several places across the United States and as grew into his adolescence, the family lived in Washington and Seattle. After his mother remarried, the family lived in the small company town of Newhalem in the North Cascade Mountains. During this time, Robert Thompson, his stepfather, was employed at Seattle City Light. His brother and father made their home on the East Coast during this time of his life.