Old School

By Tobias Wolff

Categories: Arts & Photography

Old School (2003) is Tobias Wolff's novel about a scholarship boy at an elite New England school in the early 1960s, published here by Vintage. The unnamed narrator, who hides his Jewish heritage and modest background, longs to become a writer. Each term a contest wins one student a private audience with a visiting author, and he competes to meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand and Ernest Hemingway. His hunger to win leads him to an act of plagiarism that reshapes his life.

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• Ryan Holiday: “Type out the quotes: From Old School: So much, in fact, that I began to copy out Hemingway's stories.”