Tobias Wolff
1945-
Other Works
The Night in Question
The Barracks Thief
This Boy's Life
Early Years When Tobias Wolff was five years old, his parents divorced. Wolff, who remained with his mother, lost contact with his father and his brother Geoffrey (who also became a writer). Wolff's mother remarried, and Wolff did not get along with his stepfather. His troubles at home led him to drop out of high school. He later wrote about this period in his memoir This Boy's Life, which was the basis for a film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Education After serving four years in the Army during the Vietnam War, Wolff was accepted as a student at Oxford University. He went on to study creative writing at Stanford University, where he wrote many of the stories in his first collection, In the Garden of North American Martyrs.
Career Wolff is best known for his short stories, which have appeared in many anthologies and have won major awards. He says that his stories usually take him to unexpected places: "The original idea for the story is most often a kind of cocoon in which the real story develops and is then left behind." In addition his writing, Wolff currently teaches in the English Department at Stanford University.
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