Tobias Wolff Biography

Tobias Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama. His parents separated when he was very young and he lived with his mother in the small town of Newhalem, Washington (Tobias Wolff). For post-secondary school, he applied and was accepted to The Hill School, but after it was realized that he forged most of his qualifications, he was kicked out (Tobias Wolff Biography). He later served in the Vietnam War. In 1972, he got his English Degree from Hertford College at Oxford, whose alumni include Jonathan Swift and Thomas Hobbes (Tobias Wolff Biography). After completing his English degree, he moved to California, where in 1975 he married Catherine Dolores Spohn (Tobias Wolff). Presently they still live in California with their three children

He kept writing short stories and published a second collection called Back in the World (Tobias Wolff Biography). In 1989 Wolff ventured into nonfiction, choosing to detail his life in two memoirs, one in 1989, an award-winning account of his childhood, called This Boy’s Life (which later became a movie), and another in 1994, titled In Pharaoh's Army, which describes his time as a Vietnam soldier (Tobias Wolff). He has continued to write acclaimed short story collections, such as 1997’s The Night in Question and 2008’s Our Story Begins (Tobias Wolff).

Wolff worked at Syracuse University for seventeen years from 1980 to 1997 (Tobias Wolff). Coincidentally, Raymond Carver was also teaching at Syracuse at the time (Tobias Wolff). Some of the students he worked with would become well-known authors in their own right, such as George Saunders and Alice Sebold (Tobias Wolff Biography). Wolff is currently a professor at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, where he has taught creative writing classes since the late 1990s, and acted as the director of the Creative Writing Program from 2000 to 2002 (Tobias Wolff