Tobias Wolff
The widely respected author Tobias Wolff followed an unlikely and meandering path to such a position. As his memoir This Boy's Life chronicles, Wolff's childhood and adolescence were unconventional and unpromising. Wolff was born in 1945 in Birmingham, Alabama, the second son of Arthur Wolff, an aeronautical engineer, and his wife, Rosemary. When Wolff was four his parents separated. His brother Geoffrey stayed with his father, and Wolff moved on with his mother.
Wolff and his mother moved from Florida to Utah, to Seattle, before settling in the remote Washington town of Chinook. His adolescence was characterized by loneliness, delinquency, and abuse from his stepfather. Finally fed up with his own dead-end life in high school, Wolff reestablished contact with his brother. Geoffrey Wolff, then a student at Princeton University, encouraged his younger brother to make more of himself and helped him channel his imagination into writing...
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
by Tobias Wolff
Reading club session: 21st December 2015
First published in the journal Antaeus in the spring of 1980, "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" was later revised and became the title story of Tobias Wolff's first collection of short stories, published in 1981. This collection of fiction helped Wolff earn a reputation as one of the most promising writers of his generation.
In 'In the Garden of the North American Martyrs' and the other stories in the book, Wolff probes the details of everyday life and ordinary characters in an effort to discern the aesthetic and moral patterns beneath the surface.
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
Meet Tobias Wolff. Listen to the author talk about books, reading, the his life as a writer and his novel, Old School.
Origin of the title
The Iroquois are the original inhabitants of the land on which Brandon college, where the protagonist of the story, a history professor, now sits. The League of the Iroquois became a powerful force in colonial America because of the military prowess of its member nations, the Mohawk, Cayuga, Oneida, Seneca, and Onandaga. Although they once presided over most of what is now upstate New York, the remaining 11,000 Iroquois now own less than 80,000 acres.
The Iroquois are also remembered for their savage treatment of Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant. The two French Jesuit missionaries were captured near their mission in March of 1649 and tortured before being executed. They are known as the North American Martyrs and were canonized, or declared saints, in the Catholic church in 1930.