by Tobias Wolff
“Engaging, often hilarious. . . . Wolff is so vivid and loving in his evocation of this lost world that the book feels not like a eulogy but a resuscitation. . . . The real satisfaction in this deeply satisfying book, however, comes from its main character, literature.” —The New York Sun
“Not a word is wasted in this spare, brilliant novel about the way that reading challenges and forms our lives, and about how one learns to become a writer—and a conscious human being.” —People
“Painstakingly constructed, beautifully expressed.” —Portland Tribune
“[Wolff] has created a world whose reality is so vivid, it will break your heart.” —The Baltimore Sun
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Tobias Wolff
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Henry Holt and Company, LLC, for permission to reprint an excerpt from the poem “Mending Wall” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1930, 1939, copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Co., copyright © 1967 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, copyright © 1958 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
“Class Picture,” “On Fire,” and “Frost” previously appeared in slightly different form in The New Yorker.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Wolff, Tobias, [date]
Old school: a novel / by Tobias Wolff.
p. cm.
1. Preparatory school students—Fiction. 2. Preparatory schools—Fiction. 3. Creative writing—Fiction. 4. Teenage boys—Fiction. 5. New England—Fiction. 6. Authors—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.O558O43 2003
813′.54—dc21
2003052930
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-4000-9525-4
v3.0