Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Ugly Rumours | 1975 |
| Old School | 2003 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| The Barracks Thief | 1984 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| In the Garden of the North American Martyrs / Hunters in the Snow | 1981 |
| Back in the World | 1985 |
| The Night in Question | 1996 |
| Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories | 2008 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| This Boy’s Life | 1989 |
| In Pharaoh’s Army | 1994 |
About Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff is an American short story writer, memoirist and novelist, best known for the memoirs “This Boy’s Life” and “In Pharaoh’s Army”. He has also published four collections of stories, the novel “Old School” and the novella “The Barracks Thief”, and received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2015.
Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 19 June 1945. His parents separated when he was five, and he grew up with his mother in Seattle and then in Newhalem, a company town in the North Cascade mountains of Washington, while his older brother, the writer Geoffrey Wolff, lived with their father on the East Coast. He won a place at The Hill School in Pennsylvania and was expelled in his final year. He served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1968, training with Special Forces, learning Vietnamese and serving as an adviser in Vietnam, then took a first class degree in English at Hertford College, Oxford, in 1972.
A Stegner Fellowship took him to Stanford University in 1975. His first collection, “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs”, appeared in 1981 (it was published in Britain as “Hunters in the Snow”). “The Barracks Thief”, about three young paratroopers waiting at Fort Bragg for orders to Vietnam, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1985.
“This Boy’s Life” (1989) describes his adolescence in Washington state and his mother’s marriage to an abusive man. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography and was filmed in 1993 by Michael Caton-Jones, with Leonardo DiCaprio as the young Wolff, Robert De Niro as his stepfather and Ellen Barkin as his mother. “In Pharaoh’s Army” (1994) picks up the story with his Army service in Vietnam and was a finalist for the National Book Award.
“Old School” (2003) is narrated by a writer looking back on his final year at a New England prep school in 1960 and 1961, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. “Our Story Begins” (2008), which gathers ten new stories with twenty-one earlier ones, won the Story Prize. Wolff has also won the Rea Award for the Short Story and three O. Henry Awards. He taught at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997, where his students included George Saunders and Alice Sebold, and has taught at Stanford since 1997.
Photo: Mark Coggins, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).