July 21, 2021
Long regarded as one of our finest short story writers, TOBIAS WOLFF is equally renowned for his memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharoah’s Army, and he is now in the process of finishing a novel. A beloved professor at Stanford, he is also – as he so memorably demonstrates in Ken Burns’ Hemingway documentary – a profound reader of other writers’ works and lives. Novelist JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ sits down with Wolff to discuss life, literature, craft, and the never-ending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one’s time inhabiting the minds of others.
The 2021 Summer Speaker Series, presented by The Community Library and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, is a series of four FREE outdoor lectures hosted in Ketchum’s Forest Service Park. Advanced registration is required. This event will be livestreamed, and a recording will be available for a limited time only.
Tobias Wolff is author of the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief; the novel Old School, and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, The Night in Question, and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Story Prize, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English, Emeritus, at Stanford. In 2015 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
John Burnham Schwartz is the bestselling author of six novels, including The Red Daughter, The Commoner, and Reservation Road, which was made into a film based on his screenplay. His books have been translated into twenty languages, and he has done extensive screen and television writing for the major Hollywood studios, including as screenwriter of HBO Films’ The Wizard of Lies starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, for which he was nominated for a 2018 Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Writing. The longtime Literary Director of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, Schwartz is also host and co-producer of the literary podcast Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.
Photo credit: C Marion Ettlinger.
