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　　In this unforgettable memoir of boyhood in the 1950s, we meet

the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and

bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his

father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move.

Between themselves they develop an almost telepathic trust that

sees them through their wanderings from Florida to a small town in

Washington State. Fighting for identity and self-respect against

the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, Toby's growing up is

at once poignant and comical. His various schemes—running away to

Alaska, forging cheeks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act

of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of

possibility.

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　　Tobias Wolff Best known for his short stories and his

autobiographical writing, Tobias Wolff riveted readers and held

them fast with This Boy's Life, a groundbreaking literary memoir

that redefined the genre for an entire generation. Biography

Although Tobias Wolff has described his own youthful self as a liar

and an imposter, he has achieved in his writing a level of honesty

so unflinching it is almost painful to read. The author of two

groundbreaking literary memoirs and several volumes of

autobiographical fiction (short and long), Wolff is not just

willing to lay bare his pretenses and self-deceptions; he feels an

obligation to do so. Like Rumpelstilskin, he has spun experience,

memory, and a remarkable gift for storytelling into literary gold.

Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Wolff barely knew his largely

absent father, a man he and his older brother Geoffrey (also a

writer) have described as a con artist and a compulsive liar. While

he was still young, Wolff's parents officially split up. Geoffrey

went to live with his father; Tobias stayed with his mother, who

moved around from state to state in a steady, westerly progression

that finally landed them in Washington. Never a good judge of

character where men were concerned, his mother married an abusive

martinet who made her son's life miserable. Wolff recounted his

misspent, miserable youth in This Boy's Life, a groundbreaking 1989

memoir that later became a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen

Barkin, and Robert De Niro. Wolfe escaped his troubled home

environment by falsifying an application to a private boys' school

in the East and fabricating a resumé so remarkable it got him in.

He flunked out before graduating, enlisted in the military, and was

sent to Vietnam -- an experience he chronicled in a second memoir,

In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War, published in 1994.

When he was discharged from service, he visited England, fell in

love with the country, and studied, with the help of tutors, to

gain entrance to Oxford. He graduated with honors in 1972 and

received a scholarship to Stanford, where he received his master's

degree. A three-time winner of the O. Henry Award, Wolff is widely

respected for his short stories. His first collection, In the

Garden of the North American Martyrs, was published in 1981 and

received rave reviews from such past masters of the genre as Annie

Dillard and Joyce Carol Oates. Subsequent anthologies have only

served to solidify his reputation as a preternaturally gifted

storyteller. His 1984 novella The Barracks Thief won the

PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and in 2003, he published his first

novel, Old School, a shrewdly observed, heavily autobiographical

coming-of-age tale set in an elite boys' boarding school. Nearly as

famous for his teaching as for his books, Wolff served on the

faculty of Syracuse University for 17 years before accepting a

position at Stanford in 1997 as a professor of English literature

and creative writing. He is also a crackerjack editor and has

shepherded several short story anthologies through to publication.

Good To Know Leonardo DiCaprio beat out 400 hopefuls from Los

Angeles, New York, Florida, and all places in between to star as

Tobias Wolff in the film version of This Boy's Life. Separated at a

young age by their parent's divorce, Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff both

grew up to become successful writers. Geoffrey's 1979 memoir of

life with his con-artist father is called The Duke of Deception. In

an interview with The Boston Book Review, Tobias Wolfe discussed

the phenomenon of selective memory this way: " Memory is something

that you do; it is not something that you have. You remember, and

when you remember you bring in all the resources of invention,

calculation, self-interest and self-protection. Imagination is part

of it too." Also Known As: Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (full name)

Hometown: Northern California Date of Birth: 六月 19, 1945 Place of

Birth: Birmingham, Alabama Education: B.A., Oxford University,

1972; M.A., Stanford University, 1975

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　　Fortune Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I

crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to

cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn.

The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the comer and

shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We

stared after it. "Oh, Toby," my mother said, "he's lost his

brakes." The sound of the hom grew distant, then faded in the wind

that sighed in the trees all around us. By the time we got there,

quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck

went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen

hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it

lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A

stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in

the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the

accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff's

edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder. For

the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me,

brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play

for souvenirs. I knew she bad no money for them, and I had tried

not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn't help myself.

When we pulled out of Grand junction I owned a beaded Indian belt,

beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable,

tooled-leather saddle. It was 1955 and we were driving from Florida

to Utah, to get away from a man my mother was afraid of and to get

rich on uranium. We were going to change our luck. We'd left

Sarasota in the dead ofsummer, right after my tenth birthday, and

beaded West under low flickering skies that turned black and

exploded and cleared just long enough to leave the air gauzy with

steam. We drove through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky,

stopping to cool the engine in towns where people moved with

arthritic slowness and spoke in thick, strangled tongues. Idlers

with rotten teeth surrounded the car to press peanuts on the pretty

Yankee lady and her little boy, arguing among themselves about

shortcuts. Women looked up from their flower beds as we drove past,

or watched us from their porches, sometimes impassively, sometimes

giving us a nod and a flutter of their fans. Every couple of hours

the Nash Rambler boiled over. My mother kept digging into her

little grubstake but no mechanic could fix it. All we could do was

wait for it to cool, then drive on until it boiled over again. (My

mother came to bate this machine so much that not long after we got

to Utah she gave it away to a woman she met in a cafeteria.) At

night we slept in boggy rooms where headlight beams crawled up and

down the walls and mosquitoes sang in our ears, incessant as the

tires whining on the highway outside. But none of this bothered me.

I was caught up in my mother's freedom, her delight in her freedom,

her dream of transformation. Everything was going to change when we

got out West. My mother had been a girl in Beverly Hills, and the

life we saw ahead of us was conjured from her memories of

California in the days before the Crash. Her father, Daddy as she

called him, had been a navy officer and a paper millionaire. They'd

lived in a big house with a turret. Just before Daddy lost all his

money and all his shanty-Irish relatives' money and got himself

transferred overseas, my mother was one of four girls chosen to

ride on the Beverly Hills float in the Tournament of Roses. The

float's theme was "The End of the Rainbow" and it won that year's

prize by acclamation. She met Jackie Coogan. She had her picture

taken with Harold Lloyd and Marion Davies, whose movie The Sailor

Man was filmed on Daddy's ship. When Daddy was at sea she and her

mother lived a dream life in which, for days at a time, they played

the part of sisters. And the cars my mother told me about as we

waited for the Rambler to cool--I should have seen the cars! Daddy

drove a Franklin touring car. She'd been courted by a boy who bad

his own Chrysler convertible with a musical horn. And of course

there was the Hernandez family, neighbors who'd moved up from

Mexico after finding oil under their cactus ranch. The family was

large. When they were expected to appear somewhere together they

drove singly in a caravan of identical Pierce-Arrows. Something

like that was supposed to happen to us. People in Utah were getting

up poor in the morning and going to bed rich at night. You didn't

need to be a mining engineer or a mineralogist. All you needed was

a Geiger counter. We were on our way to the uranium fields, where

my mother would get a job and keep her eyes open. Once she learned

the ropes she'd start prospecting for a claim of her own. And when

she found it she planned to do some serious compensating: for the

years of hard work, first as a soda jerk and then as a novice

secretary, that had gotten her no farther than flat broke and

sometimes not that far. For the breakup of our family five years

earlier. For the misery of her long affair with a violent man. She

was going to make up for lost time, and I was going to help

her.

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Dwight made a study of me.

Though it must have been a mild episode of withdrawal it did not seem mild to me, especially since I didn't know what it was, or that it would come to an end. Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people. I didn't know the Welches. I had no right to see them this way. I had no right to feel fear or pity or disgust, no right to feel anything but sorry for what I had done. I did feel these things, though. A kind of panic came over me. I couldn't take a good breath. All I wanted was to get away.

我来犹他州，并不是为了继续当过去的那个男孩。

我父亲听到风声，从康涅狄格州打来电话，坚决不许我换掉他给我取的名字。他说这是一个古老家族的名字。其实这不是真的，它仅仅只是听起来好像如此，正如他在古董店购买的家具只是看上去像是祖传家具而已，他为自己设计的盾徽也只是看上去像是来自某位骁勇男爵的，这位男爵终其一生都在与萨拉森人血战，他沿着泥泞的道路冲锋陷阵，道路两旁都是农民和自由民。

我们本来也可以过上那样的生活。在犹他州，真的有人可以一夜暴富。并不一定非要当上采矿工程师或矿物学家才能赚钱，只需要一个盖革计数器，就能致富。我们正前往铀矿，在那里，母亲将找到一份工作，并擦亮眼晴，处处留神。一且她摸到门道，便会开始勘探自己的铀矿。

媒体评论

　　Publishers Weekly In PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Wolff's fourth

book, he recounts his coming-of-age with customary skill and

self-assurance. Seeking a better life in the Northwestern U.S. with

his divorced mother, whose ``strange docility, almost paralysis,

with men of the tyrant breed'' taught Wolff the virtue of

rebellion, he considered himself ``in hiding,'' moved to invent a

private, ``better'' version of himself in order to rise above his

troubles. Primary among these were the adultsdrolly eccentric,

sometimes dementedwho were bent on humiliating him. Since Wolff the

writer never pities Wolff the boy, the author characterizes the

crew of grown-up losers with damning objectivity, from the neurotic

stepfather who painted his entire house (piano and Christmas tree

included) white, to the Native American football star whose

ultimate failure was as inexplicable as his athletic brilliance.

Briskly and candidly reportedWolff's boyhood best friend ``bathed

twice a day but always gave off an ammoniac hormonal smell, the

smell of growth and anxiety''his youth yields a self-made man whose

struggle to fit the pieces together is authentic and endearing.

Literary Guild alternate. (Jan.) Library Journal Winner of the

PEN/Faulkner award for The Barracks Thief , Wolff offers an

engrossing and candid look into his childhood and adolescence in

his first book of nonfiction. In unaffected prose he recreates

scenes from his life that sparkle with the immediacy of narrative

fiction. The result is an intriguingly guileless book, distinct

from the usual reflective commentary of autobiography, that

chronicles the random cruelty of a step father, the ambiguity of

youthful friendships, and forgotten moments like watching The

Mickey Mouse Club. Throughout this youthful account runs the solid

thread of the author's respect and affection for his mother and a

sense of wonder at the inexplicable twistings and turnings of the

road to adulthood in modern America. Highly recommended. Linda

Rome, Mentor, Ohio

书籍介绍

This unforgettable memoir of boyhood in the 1950s, a true modern classic, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling. Separated by the divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the moves. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into as new world of possibility.