Tobias Wolff is a writer, journalist and educator. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on June 19, 1945. Wolff attended Oxford University and Stanford University. Wolff joined the army after high school and served from 1964 to 1968. He was trained in Vietnamese and became an advisor during the Vietnam War. After returning from the service, held faculty positions at Stanford University, Goddard College, Arizona State University, and Syracuse University. He was also a reporter for the Washington Post. Wolff's first book, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, won the St. Lawrence award for fiction in 1982. The Barracks Thief won the PEN/Faulkner award for fiction in 1985 and This Boy's… Life: A Memoir won the Los Angeles Times Book prize in 1989 and was made into a 1993 film starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Wolff has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Arizona Council on Arts and Humanities. He has also received the Rea award, the Whiting Writer's award, and the Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Award.