Author Tobias Wolff to speak at The Haverford School Oct. 17

I learned about this via a tweet from The Hill School: Author Tobias Wolff, Hill class of 1964, will be speaking at The Haverford School next Wednesday. Below is the announcement that's posted on The Haverford School's site. The reading is free and open to the public.

Oct. 17: A reading with award-winning author Tobias Wolff

TOBIAS WOLFF

Award-winning author Tobias Wolff will deliver the 15th Annual Edward R. Hallowell Literary Lecture on Wednesday, Oct. 17, at 7:30 p.m. in The Haverford School’s Ball Auditorium (lower level of the Upper School). A book signing will follow the event and a selection of Wolff’s books will be available for purchase, including Our Story Begins (Vintage, 2009), Old School (Vintage, 2004), In Pharaoh’s Army (Vintage, 1995), and This Boy’s Life (Grove, 2000).


Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his peripatetic mother, finally settling in Washington State, where he grew up. As a scholarship student, he attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a night watchman, a waiter, and a high school teacher before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He is currently Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the Humanities at Stanford, where he lives with his wife Catherine. They have three children.

Tobias Wolff’s books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief; the novel Old School, and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Story Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The reading is free and open to the public. Seating is limited to 250 and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

For further information, please call 610-642-3020, ext. 1311. The School is located at 450 Lancaster Ave., Haverford.