Tobias Wolff is best known for his work in two genres: the short story and the memoir. His first short story collection,
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981. The collection was well received and several of its stories have since reappeared in a number of anthologies. Its publication coincided with a period in which several American authors who worked almost exclusively in the short story form were receiving wider recognition. As writers like Wolff, Raymond Carver, and Andre Dubus became better known, many proclaimed that the United States was in the midst of a renaissance of the short story. (The 20th-century North American version of realism these writers used was often glibly labelled
Dirty realism).
Wolff, however, repudiates such claims. In 1994, in the introduction to
The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, he wrote,
- To judge from the respectful attention this renaissance has received from reviewers and academics, you would think that it actually happened. It did not. This is a rhetorical flourish to give glamour, even valor, to the succession of one generation by another. The problem with the word "renaissance" is that it needs a dark age to justify itself. I can't think of one, myself... The truth is that the short story form has reliably inspired brilliant performances by our best writers, in a line unbroken since the time of Poe.
Wolff's 1984 novella
The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for 1985. Most of the action takes place at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where three recent paratrooper training graduates are temporarily attached to an airborne infantry company as they await orders to report to Vietnam. Because most of the men in the company fought together in Vietnam, the three newcomers are treated as outsiders and ignored. When money and personal property are discovered missing from the barracks, suspicion falls on the three newcomers. The narrative structure of the book contains several shifts of tone and point of view as the story unfolds.
In 1985, Wolff's second short story collection,
Back in the World was published. Several of the stories in this collection, such as "The Missing Person," are significantly longer than the stories in his first collection.
Wolff chronicled his early life in two memoirs.
This Boy's Life (1989) concerns itself with the author's adolescence in Seattle and then Newhalem, a remote company town in the North Cascade mountains of Washington State. The memoir describes the nomadic and uncertain life Wolff and his mother experienced after the divorce of Wolff's parents and then his mother's subsequent marriage to an abusive husband and stepfather.
In Pharaoh's Army (1994) records Wolff's U.S. Army tour of duty in Vietnam. A third collection of stories,
The Night in Question, was published in 1997.
Our Story Begins, a collection of new and previously-published stories, appeared in 2008.
Whether he is writing fiction or non-fiction, Wolff's prose is characterized by an exploration of personal/biographical and existential terrain. As Wyatt Mason wrote in the
London Review of Books, "Typically, his protagonists face an acute moral dilemma, unable to reconcile what they know to be true with what they feel to be true. Duplicity is their great failing, and Wolff's main theme."
In 1989, Wolff was chosen as recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Wolff has received the O. Henry Award on three occasions, for the stories 'In the Garden of North American Martyrs' (1981), 'Next Door' (1982), and 'Sister' (1985). On March 4, 2009, he was awarded The Story Prize for
Our Story Begins.