Tobias Wolff Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Selected Shorts Books

Publication Order of Art of the Story Books

Publication Order of Contemporary Literature and the Life of Faith Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

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.

As a child, Tobias Wolff was a Boy Scout and used to work a paper route. He went to high school in the North Cascades where he attended Concrete High School before he went to The Hill School that was in Philadelphia. Wolff had applied to the school under the very long name of Tobias Jonathan von Ansell Wolff III as he took one of his father’s many personas who used to go by Saunders Ansell-Wolff III. At some point, Tobias was discovered to be a fraud since he had concocted his recommendation letters and transcripts and this led to his expulsion from the school. Thereafter he served in the American military and was deployed to Vietnam between 1964 and 1968. As a Special Forces trainee he was an adviser in Vietnam which necessitated that he learn Vietnamese. In the early 1970s, he was back in college and went to Hertford College where he graduated with a degree in English attaining a First Class Honours certification. In 1975, he moved back to the US where he earned an MA from Stanford University and got a Creative Writing Wallace Stegner Fellowship.

In 1980, Wolff got a job at Syracuse University even as he continued to write. It was in 1981 that he published his first short story collection while he taught alongside Raymond Carver who was a professor in the graduate writing program. In 1997, he transitioned to a professorship in the School of Sciences and Humanities at Stanford where he taught creative writing and English. Between 2000 and 2002 he was also the Creative Program Director.

Tobia Wolff published Old School, his novel set in the 1960s in 2003. The setting is a boy’s prep school in New England where the narrator is attending school on a scholarship. It is a bookish and eccentric place in which the heroes are the writers rather than the athletes. The school usually holds a series of literary competitions in which the prize is time with a notable person who judges the competition. Robert Frost was the first judge followed by Ayn Rand even though none of these saw the narrator’s work as good enough. Obsessed with recognition and approval, he decides to cut corners with his submission. So desperate to impress the judges he finds a literary journal and plagiarizes some of it for his submission. But he is ultimately discovered and expelled from the school. The expulsion forces him to deal with his ambitions, identity, and the ethical intricacies of artistic integrity and authenticity. It is an insightful exploration of the moral challenges in the journey toward self-discovery faced by adolescents.

This Boy’s Life is a classic memoir that Tobias Wolff published in 1989 that has also been made into a movie. It tells Wolff’s story as a troubled boy who is always in trouble and is always making trouble. When his parent’s marriage failed, he decided to take the name of Jack London, who he loved reading about. Alongside his mother, he moved across the country and ended up in Utah hoping to make some money from the mining boom. However, they are unsuccessful in their quest and go on the move once again eventually making their home in the Washington community of Concrete. His mother gets into a relationship with a pleasant man but things soon go awry when he turns out to be a controlling and abusive man who mistreats Jack. As he suffers at the hands of his stepfather, Jack is coming to terms with his moral compass and his identity. He is soon getting into all kinds of mischief that range from forging checks to stealing and lying. He is doing this even as he tries to get away from his horrible home and remake his persona.

Tobias Wolff published The Night in Question a collection of short stories, in 1995. The works are an exploration of the intricacies of moral dilemmas and human relationships. The stories delve into motifs of betrayal, loyalty, and the unexpected consequences of everyday decisions. Wolff combines the banal with the absurd to make for tension-filled stories that force readers to look deeper into how bizarre their lives are. As usual, Tobias Wolff is an expert at storytelling as these stories come with classic humor, and compassionate understanding, even as they offer deep insights into the human condition.