Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wolff, Tobias - Pat C. Hoy II (review date summer 1995)

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Pat C. Hoy II (review date summer 1995)

SOURCE: Hoy II, Pat C. “They Died for Nothing, Did They Not?” Sewanee Review 103, no. 3 (summer 1995): 456-58.

[In the following excerpt, Hoy lauds In Pharaoh's Army for being a balanced and unapologetic look at the Vietnam War.]

At the end of his memoir, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, Tobias Wolff gives us a glimpse of his own homecoming after a year as an adviser to the Vietnamese army. Joining the American army had been essential to Wolff's “idea of legitimacy” because the men he had respected as he was growing up, and most of the writers he looked up to, had all served. He also wanted to become “respectable” in a way that his father had not been. Serving was the “indisputable certificate of citizenship and probity.”

Yet, when Wolff came back from Vietnam, he spent a week alone in a “seedy” San Francisco hotel room feeling not “freedom and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Valentine Cunningham (review date 14 March 1975)
   2. Bruce Allen (review date spring 1982)
   3. Richard Orodenker and Welch D. Everman (review date June 1982)
   4. Dean Flower (review date summer 1982)
   5. Bruce Allen (review date 7 June 1985)
   6. Thomas DePietro (review date autumn 1986)
   7. Linda Taylor (review date 6-12 November 1987)
   8. Richard Eder (review date 8 January 1989)
   9. Jeff Danziger (review date 16 February 1989)
   10. Geoff Dyer (review date 28 April 1989)
   11. John Clute (review date 12-18 May 1989)
   12. John Rechy (review date 5 November 1989)
   13. Peter J. Bailey (essay date summer 1991)
   14. John F. Desmond (essay date 14 May 1994)
   15. Richard Eder (review date 16 October 1994)
   16. Tobias Wolff and Nicholas A. Basbanes (interview date 24 October 1994)
   17. James Hannah (essay date 21 November 1994)
   18. Amanda Hopkinson (review date 9 December 1994)
   19. Michael Wood (review date 23 December 1994)
   20. Michael O. Garvey (review date 19 May 1995)
   21. Pat C. Hoy II (review date summer 1995)
   22. Jay Rogoff (review date summer 1996)
   23. James Hannah (essay date 1996)
   24. James Hannah (essay date 1996)
   25. Erin McGraw (review date summer 1997)
   26. Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Glass (interview date July 1997)
   27. Daniel D. Challener (essay date 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright