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Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff is an American author, memoirist, and teacher. Wolff was born in on June 19th, 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama to Rosemary and Arthur Wolff. He lived with his mother after his parents separated when he was a child, and the pair moved around frequently. Wolff served in the U.S. army from 1964-1968 and was a paratrooper during the Vietnam War. After completing his service, Wolff received a First Class Honours degree in English from Hertford College, Oxford in 1972. He returned to the U.S. three years later and pursued an M.A. in Creative Writing at Stanford, where he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing.
Wolff worked on his own writing while teaching at Syracuse University from 1980-1997, where he worked with American short story author and poet Raymond Carver. In 1981, Wolff published his first short story collection titled In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, which received high praise. Three years later, Wolff used his own experiences in the U.S. army to write a novella (The Barracks Thief) about three recent paratrooper training graduates who are awaiting orders to report to Vietnam. The novella would go on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction a year later. Wolff continues to be a prolific fiction writer who has published three novels and six collections of short stories.
Wolff has also dabbled in nonfiction and is the author of two memoirs. The first, This Boy's Life (1989), recounts episodes from Wolff’s troubled childhood and adolescence, including the divorce of his parents and the subsequent traveling he and his mother embarked on as well as the abuse of his stepfather. This Boy’s Life was eventually adapted into a film in 1993 starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a young Wolff, Robert De Niro as Wolff's stepfather, and Ellen Barkin as Wolff's mother. Wolff also published In Pharaoh's Army in 1994 about his experiences in Vietnam.
In 1997, Wolff transferred to Stanford, where he was appointed the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and now serves as Professor Emeritus. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2015.
