August 14, 2009

Contact:   Stacey Schmeidel

Davidson, NC--Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy's Life and Old School, among other books, will speak at Davidson College on Tuesday, Sept. 8, at 7:30 p.m. in Duke Family Performance Hall. The event is open to the public at no charge, and tickets are not required. Wolff will sign copies of Old School and his other books during a reception after his talk.

Published in 2003, Old School is the first-year reading assignment for Davidson's new students this fall, and the opening event in a year-long Celebration of Honor and Integrity at the college. Old School was chosen as the college's first-year reading because of its focus on, among other things, honor, integrity, plagiarism and literature. Wolff's Sept. 8 appearance at Davidson will conclude with questions for the author from new students.

Accomplished in both fiction and non-fiction writing, Wolff is perhaps best known for his memoirs and short stories. His books include two novels, The Barracks Thief and Old School; two memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army; and several collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question and Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. Wolff has also edited Best American Short Stories, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories and A Doctor's Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's and other magazines and literary journals.

Wolff's work has been 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.

Wolff grew up in the Pacific Northwest and received a scholarship to The Hill School in Pennsylvania. In his final year, he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics; he joined the U.S. Army and spent several years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge, he attended Hertford College in Oxford. He earned a First Class Honours degree from Hertford in 1972, then received his M.A. degree from Stanford. In 1975, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford. He began teaching at Stanford in 1997, and now serves as the university's Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Davidson's Celebration of Honor and Integrity marks the 100th year of a student-run honor system at the college. The celebration will include public events, exhibits, panel discussions and alumni programs.

Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,800 students located 20 minutes north of Charlotte in Davidson, N.C. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently regarded as one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country. Through The Davidson Trust, the college became the first liberal arts institution in the nation to replace loans with grants in all financial aid packages, giving all students the opportunity to graduate debt-free. Davidson competes in NCAA athletics at the Division I level, and a longstanding Honor Code is central to student life at the college.
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