Master story writer Tobias Wolff will give a public reading Friday, Sept. 21, at 8 p.m. in the Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium at Cornell University. Wolff, author of such brilliant short story collections as The Night in Question, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs andThe Barracks Thief, is the latest guest of the 2001 James McConkey Reader in American Fiction series at Cornell. The event is free and open to the public.

Wolff, the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University, also is the author of two highly acclaimed memoirs, This Boy's Life and In Pharaoh's Army . Earlier this year he was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received numerous awards for his work including: the 1985 Pen/Faulkner Award, the Whiting Foundation Award in 1990, and Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Award in 1993, among others.

This Boy's Life was made into the 1993 movie of the same name starring Robert De Niro, Ellen Barkin and Leonardo DiCaprio. In Pharaoh's Army , Wolff's lucid memoir of the Vietnam War, won the Esquire-Volvo-Waterstone Prize for Nonfiction in 1994 and was a finalist for the National Book Award and Los Angeles Times Book Award. His works have been published in numerous literary magazines including The Atlantic Monthly , The New Yorker , Granta , Story , Esquire and Antaeus .

In describing The Night in Question , (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), a critic for the New York Times Book Review stated: "Wolff's range, sometimes within the same story, extends from fastidious realism to the grotesque and lyrical. These stories provoke our amazed appreciation." Critics at Publisher's Weekly described Wolff's characterizations as "impeccable … his ear pitch-perfect and his eyes unblinking yet compassionate."

Wolff was born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1945. He served in the U.S. Army from 1964-68; he later attended Oxford University where he received a B.A. in 1972 and an M.A. in 1975; he also received an M.A. from Stanford in 1978. For more information about Wolff's visit or the McConkey Reader series, contact Michael Koch, editor of Epoch, Cornell's literary journal, at (607) 255-3385.