"With the same masterful prose and emotional subtlety that distinguished his bestselling memoir This Boy's Life, Tobias Wolff's first novel, Old School, explores the deceptions and betrayals that turn a boy into a writer. The protagonist is a student at an elite prep school in 1960. He is an outsider who has learned to mimic the negligent manner of his privileged classmates. Like many of them, he wants to be a writer. But to do that he must learn to tell the truth about who he actually is. Through the agency of a school literary contest-whose winner will be recognized by the most legendary writer of his time-Wolff animates the clash between idealism and ambition, the fear of obscurity and the fear of revelation."