Festival Honoree
At the heart of the Literary Festival lies the prestigious F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature, a distinguished honor bestowed upon an eminent American writer. The recipient, gracing the festival with their presence, not only receives the accolade but also engages attendees with a captivating reading and master class.
Notably, the festival has proudly included Pulitzer Prize winners among its distinguished recipients over the years, showcasing a tradition of honoring some of the most illustrious figures in American literature from the past half-century.
We invite you to view the list of honorees for previous years, dating back to the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival’s founding in 1996.
2026 Festival Honoree:
Tobias Wolff
Tobias Wolff will receive the 2026 F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature at the 30th annual F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival in Rockville, Maryland, in October 2026.
Born in Alabama in 1945, Tobias Wolff traveled the country with his peripatetic mother, finally settling in Washington state, where he grew up. As a scholarship student, he attended the Hill School in Pennsylvania until he was expelled for repeated failures in mathematics in his final year, whereupon he joined the Army. He spent four years as a paratrooper, including a tour in Vietnam. Following his discharge he attended Oxford University in England, where he received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1972. Returning to the United States, he worked variously as a reporter, a night watchman, a waiter, and a high school teacher before receiving a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1975. He taught at Syracuse University from 1980 to 1997 and at Stanford University from 1997 to 2020. He is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English, Emeritus, at Stanford, where he lives with his wife Catherine. They have three children and four grandchildren.
His books include the memoirs This Boy’s Life (1989) and In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War; the short novel The Barracks Thief (1984); the novels Ugly Rumours (1975), Old School (2003), and four collections of short stories, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985), The Night in Question (1997), and, most recently, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008). He has also edited several anthologies, among them Best American Short Stories 1994, A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov, and The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories.
His work is translated widely and has received numerous awards, including three O. Henry Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Barracks Thief, The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for This Boy’s Life, both the PEN/Malamud and the Rea Award for Excellence in the Short Story, the Story Prize for Our Story Begins, and the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2015 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama, and in 2024 the Hadada Award from the Paris Review for “strong and unique commitment to literature.” This Boy’s Life was adapted as a feature film in 1993; and in 2001 his short story “Bullet in the Brain” was adapted as a short film.
