Old School (Paperback) ~ Tobias Wolff (Author) Cover Art

Old School (Paperback)

By: Tobias Wolff (Author)

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Review

"Tobias Wolff possesses a clarity of style which is singular and singularly affecting. He brings characters alive....Replete with both nostalgia for a more innocent world, and also frustration with a more naive one, Tobias Wolff's story shows us that there is no substitute for experience. An illuminating contemporary masterpiece which no thoughtful reader should ignore."

"[OLD SCHOOL] is a fine offering, manly in spirit and style, less hangdog than the somewhat Carverian memoir. Throughout OLD SCHOOL, Wolff displays exceptional skill in capturing the small sights and sensations that evoke the whole rarefied world he's taking us back to...."

First line

Robert Frost made his visit in November 1960, just a week after the general election.

Publisher's note

The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy’s Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel.
Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he’s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.
The school’s mystique is rooted in Literature, and for many boys this becomes an obsession, editing the review and competing for the attention of visiting writers whose fame helps to perpetuate the tradition. Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK’s inauguration, is far less controversial than the next visitor, Ayn Rand. But the final guest is one whose blessing a young writer would do almost anything to gain.

No one writes more astutely than Wolff about the process by which character is formed, and here he illuminates the irresistible power, even the violence, of the self-creative urge. Resonant in ways at once contemporary and timeless, Old School is a masterful achievement by one of the finest writers of our time.

Annotation

The narrator of short-story/memoir writer Tobias Wolff's first novel is a prep school boy on scholarship in the early 1960s--a boy whose background is something like the author's. A promising writer, he rises to the top in the school, and when Hemingway stops by and singles out one of the narrator's stories for praise, what should be a high point of the boy's life turns out to be a catastrophe. Set during a time and in a milieu when writing and literature were of the highest importance, OLD SCHOOL is both a nostalgic look back and a sensitive exploration of adolescence. Most of all, it is a celebration of the writing life, illuminating it from the perspective of one of America's most accomplished fiction writers. A New York Times Notable Book for 2003.

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