Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American short story writer, memoirist, novelist, and teacher of creative writing.

He has written four short story collections and two novels including The Barracks Thief (1984), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

)[2][4] His parents separated when Wolff was five and his elder brother Geoffrey was twelve; he lived with his mother in a variety of places, including Seattle, Washington, when he was an adolescent.

After she remarried, they lived in Newhalem, a small company town in the North Cascade Mountains, where his stepfather, Robert Thompson, worked at Seattle City Light.

After returning to the United States, in 1975, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University, where he earned an M.A.

Authors who had studied with Wolff as students at Syracuse include Jay McInerney, Tom Perrotta, George Saunders,[6] Alice Sebold, William Tester, Paul Griner, Ken Garcia, Dana C. Kabel, Jan-Marie Spanard, and Paul Watkins.

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 such as Wolff, Raymond Carver and Andre Dubus became better known, the United States was said to be having a renaissance of the short story.

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.

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.

Three recent paratrooper training graduates are temporarily attached to an airborne infantry company as they await orders to report to Vietnam.

This Boy's Life (1989), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, is devoted to the author's adolescence in Seattle and Newhalem, a remote company town in the North Cascade mountains of Washington.

His mother's subsequent marriage to a man who was revealed as an abusive husband and stepfather deeply affected their lives.

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).