After featuring such illustrious poets as Kathy Acker, Kathryn Davis, Lane Von Herzen '84 and most recently, Professor Lev Loseff, the English Department will close off Dartmouth's poetry and prose winter series with writer Tobias Wolff.
Wolff's latest work, "A Pharaoh's Army," recounts his experiences as an army advisor in Vietnam, striking a fine balance between fiction and nonfiction. He has also published several collections of stories including "In the Garden of North American Martyrs," "Back in the World" and "The Stories of Tobias Wolff."
His most well-known work is, however, the novel "This Boy's Life," which was ultimately made into a film. The novel has an autobiographical theme, telling the story of an aspiring writer and his experiences in Concrete, WA, with an eccentric mother and abusive stepfather
His writing style is often autobiographical and he has a knack for creating characters that reflect concretions of his emotional state of mind. "The civilized understandings that go on between people, the liberal tolerance that I once despised as being insufficiently radical seems to me now the most hopeful thing we have," said Wolff.
He is particularly articulate about his experiences in Vietnam, focusing on the disillusionment of the entire experience in "A Pharaoh's Army." "I wanted to be a writer, I knew that, but I was so shocked by the whole thing when I got there, the alienness of it," said Wolff, who served in the Mekong Delta in 1967-68.
"A Pharaoh's Army" also includes stories about Wolff's life before and after Vietnam. A love affiar, the unwelcome emergence of his father and confronting an anti-war demonstrator on the UC-Berkeley campus are just some of the anecdotes Wolff talks about.
Wolff will read selections from the five books he has written to date in the Wren Room of Sanborn Library tonight at 4 p.m. Admission is free.
