The Montgomery Endowment was established in 1977 by Kenneth Montgomery '25 and his wife Harle to bring luminaries to Dartmouth for "the advancement of the academic realm of the College," according to the Montgomery Endowment's website. Since 1977, over 180 Montgomery Fellows have visited the College, including Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Michel Foucault, Gerald Ford, Sheryl Crow and Bobby McFerrin.
Hailed as a master of the short story and memoir genres, Wolff is best known for his 1989 memoir "This Boy's Life," which chronicles his childhood moving from Florida to Utah to Washington with his single mother and his time at the Hill School in Pennsylvania. The memoir was made into a motion picture of the same name in 1993, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro. Ten years later, Wolff published his first novel, "Old School," about a literary competition at an elite boy's boarding school.
A graduate of Oxford's Hertford College and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Wolff taught creative writing at Syracuse University for many years and returned to Stanford as an English professor in 1997. Wolff is particularly well known in the literary world for his portrayals of the details of ordinary life, according to former comparative literature professor and Montgomery Endowment Executive Director Richard Stamelman, who introduced Wolff at the lecture.
This week marks Wolff's third trip to Dartmouth, having first visited the College in 1979, he said. Wolff was invited to Dartmouth as a Montgomery Fellow by Stamelman. As a Montgomery Fellow, Wolff has visited several English and creative writing classes, met with Dartmouth faculty, participated in lunch discussions with aspiring writers and stayed at the picturesque Montgomery House overlooking Occom Pond.
"My visit to Dartmouth so far has been pleasant and effortless," Wolff said. "It feels as if a red carpet had been rolled out to California for me."
Wolff began his lecture by reciting Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken."
"When I started reading this poem later in life, I realized that it's not about taking the difficult road, but about how we naturally glamorize the roads that we've taken by attributing to ourselves valor, individuality and other virtues," Wolff said. "With that in mind, you'll want to keep my account of myself within that lens."
In his lecture, Wolff chronicled his development as a writer. He began writing at the age of 15 and cited Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as being among his early authorial influences, emphasizing the value of reading in learning how to write well.
"Read a lot," Wolff said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "You'll internalize the English sentence, how stories are told and how characters are drawn. Read all the time."
Wolff also highlighted the importance of reading in his lecture.
"No writer I know isn't a reader and hasn't been a reader since they were young," Wolff said. "Think about those books that first made the hair on your neck stand up, those ones that made you bring a flashlight to bed."
Wolff told the audience that he was first captured by the novels of Albert Payson Terhune, who wrote largely about Collie dogs. Wolff's mother, who worked at a soda fountain and attended secretarial college when Wolff was young, had read the Terhune novels as a girl and gave them to Wolff to read. A librarian then asked Wolff if he had read "White Fang" or "Call of the Wild," and Wolff soon became hooked on Jack London's writing, even bargaining with his Irish Catholic mother that he would only be confirmed in the Catholic Church if he could change his name to "Jack."
"Though I loved to read and loved to write stories just for the fun of it, I never made a connection between the reading and the doing or understood this as a possible vocation," Wolff said. "I used to write so many stories that when I was in high school, I used to give stories I'd written to my friends to turn in for extra credit because I couldn't use all of them."
In his lecture, Wolff described how imitating the writing styles of other authors, such as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, was a formative experience for him. He then detailed how his discovery of Leo Tolstoy's work in his late teens and early 20s inspired him to write about everyday life.
"What really made me love Tolstoy was the intimacy of his work," Wolff said. "I began to see the possibility that one's own ordinary experience could have such resonance."
Wolff, who has taught renowned authors Tom Perrotta and Alice Sebold, emphasized the importance of a humanities education.
"Humanities offers us chances to question our choices, and the body of literature we have access to is largely the history of people making bad choices," Wolff said. "Literature allows us to acquire self-awareness and learn something about how language can reach places in ourselves otherwise inexpressible."
Wolff said that luck has played an important role in his development as a writer.
"We like to think we are in charge of our lives, but they are in charge of us," Wolff said in the interview. "I know a lot of fine writers who have not had any luck and others who have enjoyed tremendous success. I've been luckier than I ever thought I'd be."
Wolff also attributed his success to encouragement, emphasizing a summer he spent with his older brother, who at the time had recently graduated from college as an English major, and his time at boarding school. At the school, he had the opportunity to meet Robert Frost, William Golding and Edmund Wilson through a literary competition, which he chronicled in "Old School."
Wolff concluded his talk by reading a passage from "Old School" and answering questions from the audience.
"I sometimes feel like Jacob Marley dragging his chain when I go to my desk to write," Wolff said. "There are times I think I could live without writing, but then I get restless. I could live, I could breathe and eat, but I'd be restless in my soul if I wasn't writing."
