Old School

The narrator attends a New England prep school and wants badly to belong. He copies the bearing and manners of the boys around him and hides as much of his real self as he can.

The school prizes literature above everything else. Many boys edit the literary review and compete for the attention of visiting writers, whose fame keeps the tradition alive.

Robert Frost, soon to appear at JFK's inauguration, is the first guest named. Ayn Rand, a far more divisive figure, follows. The last visitor is a writer whose blessing a young author would do almost anything to earn.

The narrator's final year undoes what he has built. His standing, his disguise and his future shift in ways nobody around him could have foreseen.

This first novel by Tobias Wolff looks at how character gets formed, and at the pull and even the violence of inventing oneself. Each visiting writer puts more pressure on the boy's careful disguise.