Professor Howard Wolf:
Office: 437 Clemens Hall
Phone: (716) 645-2575, Ext. 1042
E-mail: hwolf@acsu.buffalo.edu

Academic Biography
Born in the Bronx, but quickly spirited to Manhattan, I attended P.S. 187 in upper Manhattan, Washington Heights, and graduated in 1950. It took me a little while to realize that I was a mid-century child, but I’m sure it shaped, to some extent, my interest in social and generational history. I entered Horace Mann School (then, for Boys), Riverdale (Bronx) as a Third Former at that point. I became interested in journalism and literature at Horace Mann, interests that have endured for a lifetime. After HM, I went to Amherst College where my enthusiasm for Thomas Wolfe ran into the rigors of the New Criticism in a course that Reuben Brower, who had moved on to Harvard, had left behind as a legacy. I wrote short stories and poetry at Amherst and published an essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald in a student publication. I took off 1956-57 as a wanderjahr, wrote a failed novella, and returned to Amherst, wrote an honors thesis on Medieval English Literature, and graduated in 1959. I spent 1959-60 in New York, earning an MA at Columbia, writing a short thesis on Robert Lowell, discovering interests in autobiography as I worked. Weary of school, I went into the army, worked in publishing, and lived in Greenwich Village. I then decided, after the glamor of Madison Avenue had worn off, to try teaching. I went to Boston University for a year as a TA, liked the feeling of the classroom, and headed West to Ann Arbor where I stayed for four years and wrote a psychoanalytic thesis on Henry James. This interest brought me to UB where Norman Holland was building the Group for Applied Psychoanalysis. I worked in this area for about seven years, but, by the end of the Viet Nam period, I was committed to literary journalism, autobiography, American Literature, and various approaches to creative writing (including letters, travel writing, personal essays, and some fiction). Beginning with a Fulbright to Turkey (Ankara) in 1983-84, I began to see more of the world: a year in Kuala Lumpur for UB (1988); lecture tour of India in 1990; three years in Hong Kong (91-94); a second Fulbright to South Africa in 1998. These grand tours were punctuated with sabbaticals (Berkeley, 1974; Charleston, SC, 1981). My publications reflect my interests. Let me mention a few: 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 Autobiographical Impulse in America: Essays on the Crisis of the Humanities in America, 1993. I am currently writing an homage to my late father and planning a second memoir on life, education, and travel.

Welcome, traveler.