Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Wolff, Tobias - Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Glass (interview date July 1997)


Wolff, Tobias - Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Glass (interview date July 1997)

Tobias Wolff and Elizabeth Glass (interview date July 1997)

SOURCE: Wolff, Tobias, and Elizabeth Glass. “Mastering the Memoir: Tobias Wolff.” Writer's Digest (July 1997): 25-7.

[In the following interview, Wolff discusses This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army, explaining his opinions on the differences between literary memoir and autobiography.]

Although the “literary memoir” has been around for decades, Tobias Wolff helped pioneer its current incarnation as a genre that's reaching a wide audience among today's readers. Wolff's seminal work, This Boy's Life, is often pointed to as the first literary memoir that employed aspects of creative nonfiction—recreated dialogue, a fictive-narrative structure, use of scenes instead of mere retelling—to add excitement and meaning to a traditional essay structure.

His 1994 memoir, In Pharaoh's Army, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and This...

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