Howard R. Wolf, professor of English and author of a wide range of non-fiction and fictional works, was born in New York City in 1936. He attended the Horace Mann School and graduated from Amherst College in 1959 (nevertheless identifed as a member of the Class of 1958). He received an M.A. from Columbia in 1960 and a Ph.D from the University of Michigan in 1967, where he wrote a psychoanalytic thesis on novelist Henry James. Since 1967 he has taught in the English Department at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Professor Wolf has been the recipient of numerous prizes and travel fellowships (Turkey, Malaysia, Hong Kong, India, South Africa). Wolf retired from teaching in 2009.
Wolf's literary interests include social and generational history, autobiography, literary journalism, American literature, and various approaches to creative writing (including letters, travel writing, personal essays, and some fiction). His numerous publications include the following books: The Voice Within: Reading and Writing Autobiography (with Roger Porter, 1973); Forgive the Father: A Memoir of Changing Generations (1978); The Education of a Teacher (1987); A Version of Home: Letters from the World (1992); The Education of Ludwig Fried (stories, 2006); and The Autobiographical Impulse in America: Essays on the Crisis of the Humanities in America (1993).
Wolf's interest in collecting and compiling his own personal archive has been documented in an article he wrote entitled "Autobibliography, A Place in Time: On Shaping a Collection (1971-2006)" ( Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies, vol. 2, Dec. 2008). Link to full text of article (PDF)
From the guide to the Howard R. Wolf (AC 1958) Papers, 1971-2009, (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)
