Tobias Wolff was born as Jonathan Ansell Wolff on June 19, 1945, in Birmingham, Alabama. His father, Arthur Wolff, was an aeronautical engineer, and his mother, Rosemary Loftus, the daughter of a career navy man, was working as a secretary at the time of his birth. Wolff's childhood was chaotic, as his father (called "The Duke of Deception" by Wolff's brother Geoffrey in a memoir of that title) was a master of prevarication who constructed an elaborate false history—bogus degrees; a manufactured military record—which enabled him to secure an executive position in the aerospace industry in Connecticut. His family described him as a con-man, forger, car thief scrounger, dandy and drunkard, but also as a charming, charismatic, endlessly inventive man whose lies had a compelling quality which affected Tobias to the degree that he told Jean Ross in an interview: "I was...