Where to Start with Tobias Wolff: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Tobias Wolff — whether to begin with This Boy's Life, In Pharaoh's Army, or his short stories. A complete reading guide to the American memoirist.
Tobias Wolff (born 1945) is the American memoirist, short story writer, and novelist whose This Boy’s Life (1989) is one of the finest American memoirs ever written, and whose short story collections — particularly In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and The Night in Question — have made him one of the most respected practitioners of the American short story tradition. A Vietnam veteran, a professor at Stanford for many years, and the brother of the novelist Geoffrey Wolff (whose own memoir, The Duke of Deception, covers their shared childhood from the perspective of the father Tobias barely knew), Wolff writes with exceptional precision about violence, moral failure, and the capacity of the self for self-deception.
Where to Start: This Boy’s Life (1989)
The essential Wolff — and one of the great American memoirs. Toby’s mother has fled a violent boyfriend and is trying to start over. They end up in Concrete, Washington, where she meets Dwight — who is charming to her and methodical in his cruelty to Toby. Toby steals, lies, forges signatures, creates multiple versions of himself for different audiences, and survives by becoming expert at performance.
What makes the memoir extraordinary is its honesty about both sides of the violence. Wolff does not write Dwight as a simple monster; he is recognisable as the specific kind of man who uses small powers to compensate for large inadequacies. And Wolff does not write himself as a simple victim; the Toby of the memoir is genuinely troubling in his capacity for self-serving deception, genuinely impressive in his survival instinct, and genuinely human in his need for a father figure even from men who fail him.
The ending — Toby’s escape to the Hill School through an application that fabricates most of his history — is made with full awareness of what that fabrication means: he is not yet who he wants to be. The memoir is the account of how he eventually became something closer to it.
In Pharaoh’s Army (1994)
Wolff’s Vietnam memoir — the bewilderment and waste of war from the inside of a military advisor’s position. Shorter and more meditative than This Boy’s Life; his portrait of a war that no one understood.
Reading Tobias Wolff
Begin with This Boy’s Life — it is his essential memoir and one of the finest American memoirs period. Read In Pharaoh’s Army for his Vietnam account. For his short fiction — which is equally important to his reputation — begin with The Night in Question.
For the full Tobias Wolff bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Tobias Wolff author page on Editors Reads.
Affiliate disclosure: Links to Amazon on this page are affiliate links. We earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Tobias Wolff?
This Boy's Life (1989) is the essential starting point — Wolff's memoir about his childhood and adolescence with his mother and abusive stepfather in a small Washington state town in the 1950s, his own delinquency and resilience, and his eventual escape through a deceptively obtained scholarship to a prep school. One of the finest American memoirs, written with exceptional candour about the narrator's own moral failures as well as his suffering; adapted for film in 1993 with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
What is This Boy's Life about?
This Boy's Life follows Toby Wolff (who calls himself Jack in the memoir) from his mother's flight from a violent man in Utah through their eventual settlement in Concrete, Washington, where she marries Dwight — a man who proves to be controlling, petty, and cruel. The memoir is honest about both the violence of Dwight's household and Toby's own capacity for lying, stealing, and self-invention; it is a memoir about the formation of character in conditions designed to prevent it, and about the uses of narrative in both surviving and escaping.
What is In Pharaoh's Army about?
In Pharaoh's Army (1994) is Wolff's memoir of his year as a military advisor in Vietnam — stationed with a South Vietnamese unit in a village near the Cambodian border, witnessing the war from inside rather than as a front-line combatant. Shorter and more meditative than This Boy's Life; Wolff's account of Vietnam is notable for its refusal of both heroism and condemnation, its portrait of bewilderment and waste rather than clear moral narrative.
Is Tobias Wolff known for short stories?
Wolff is one of the most distinguished American short story writers of his generation — his collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985), and The Night in Question (1996) are considered essential works in the American short story tradition. His story 'Bullet in the Brain' is one of the most anthologised American stories of the late twentieth century. Readers who want to explore beyond the memoirs should start with The Night in Question.
