Tobias Wolff

Steven Goldleaf (Pace University)
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Tobias Wolff’s writing career is distinguished for its form, its moral tone, and its religious language. His form tends strongly towards brevity—the exceptions to this tendency lying in his early novel

Ugly Rumours

(1975), published only in England (and which he has described as “juvenilia” better left unpublished), his 1984 PEN/Faulkner-prize-winning novella

The Barracks Thief

, which in its scope and length (101 pages) is little longer than a long short story, and his novel,

Old School

(2003), which takes the tone, if not the form, of a expanded and fictionalized memoir chapter. The distinction between his two primary genres, the short story and the personal memoir, is sometimes elusive: the narrator of

Old School

, for example, is a boy from the Pacific Northwest, ethnically…

2748 words

Citation: Goldleaf, Steven. "Tobias Wolff". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 April 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4783, accessed 19 March 2024.]

4783 Tobias Wolff 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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