Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff, born Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff on June 19, 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, is an interesting short story author in the way he made himself known and received his credentials.  He went to the Hill School, was expelled and then joined the Army. After serving in Vietnam, he decided to go to Stanford University to receive his MA in creative writing, and this is where he has taught since creative writing since 1997.  Throughout his youth, Wolff had to overcome many struggles with his mother's instability and constant relocation.  His mother often fell victim to abusing relationships, which led to her and Tobias being on their own and frequent financial and emotional instability.

As Jean W. Ross explains in Contemporary Authors, Wolff's upbringing is often seen in his writing and short stories with an undertone of truth and irony in his themes.  This is directly paralleled to the people in his life and the encounters he had with phony family members and unreliable father figures.  Wolff himself explains, "all of my stories are in one way or another autobiographical."  This aspect of his writing has made him stand apart from different short story authors because not only do some of his characters stand as figures for his thoughts and words, but the events and things of the sort are parallels to his life and childhood.  These characters may not depict his exact life, but what he would have done if he had chosen a certain path.  He also grew up around adults and family members who were great story tellers, regardless of if that got them in trouble or not, and this lead him to being a great writer since he was six:

Both my father and my mother were great raconteurs, and my brother is also a wonderful story teller.  It's always been the most natural kind of thing for me to do.

It is interesting to have the words of Tobias Wolff state, "obviously by the time I come to write the last draft, I know where every word is going to go, and every comma.  It's in my mind from the beginning to the end, but there have been lots of surprises along the way that I hope the reader will feel even if I don't feel them when I'm writing the last draft."  This is an interesting point to bring up for our class because he directly states that he knows every textual part of his works, but he wants the readers to pick apart every sentence and every idea to get the deeper meaning.  This is a very interesting quote from Wolff because he early explains that majority of his characters are some sort of extension from himself, so he is allowing the reader to interpret his life and his journey in his or her own eyes and to pull out themes from his life.

He explicitly states that he is  a Catholic in an interview in the article Tobias Wolff and Catholicsm, and this is a great link to make connections to deeper themes in his stories.  He explains how there is corruption and crooks in the Church, and in "The Rich Brother," this is seen in his underlying messages about Donald's journey to the Church.  In other stories, his Catholicism is shown in other ways such as hope.



Quoted and Paraphrased from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Wolff

http://www.notablebiographies.com/newsmakers2/2005-Pu-Z/Wolff-Tobias.html

Lyons, B., Oliver , B., & Tobias, W. (1990). An interview with tobias wolff. The University of Wisconsin Press, 31(1), 12-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208633