2026 WINNER: Tobias Wolff F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature 10/24
The theme for 2026, in honor of Tobias’s bestselling and award-winning memoir about his childhood, This Boy’s Life, is Growing Up Is Hard to Do. Wharton Club members and guests are invited!
Thanks to all who attended the 2025 F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival! The 2026 festival is being planned for this October. We also invite you to attend the many literary events we host throughout the year. We are accepting submissions to our short story contest March 1 – June 30, 2026!
2026 WINNER: Tobias Wolff
F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature
Tobias Wolff is the author of the memoirs This Boy's Life (1989) and In Pharaoh's Army (1994), and he has also written novels and short story collections, including Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (2008). His novel The Barracks Thief (1984) won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received a National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in September 2015. Wolff 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.
Photo credit: Creative Commons license by Mark Coggins
The theme for 2026, in honor of Tobias’s bestselling and award-winning memoir about his childhood, This Boy’s Life, is Growing Up Is Hard to Do.
We invite you to get involved with the festival
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.
Tobias Wolff
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 (1994); 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.
2026 Special Guest
Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch
Richard Bausch is the author of thirteen novels, among which are Hello to the Cannibals (2002), Thanksgiving Night (2006), Peace (2008), Before, During, After (2014), and Playhouse (2023). His ten collections of short fiction include The Fireman’s Wife (1990), The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch, in The Modern Library (1996), The Stories of Richard Bausch (2003),Wives & Lovers: 3 Short Novels (2004), Something is Out There (2010),Living in The Weather of the World (2017) and, most recently, The Fate of Others (2025). His multiple honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Award in Literature Academy of Arts and Letters, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, the 2004 PEN/Malamud Prize; the 2009 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel, Peace; and the Rea Award for Achievement in the Art of Short Fiction. In addition, his work has been adapted for three full length feature films. He has been with the Writing Program of Chapman University in Orange, CA since 2012.
Past Honorees
PAST HONOREES
Recipients of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Achievement in American Literature have included many of America’s most distinguished writers. Award honorees have received 18 Pulitzer Prizes. All of these honorees, with the exception of those honored during the times of the Covid pandemic, were present to accept the award.
- 1996: William Styron
- 1997: John Barth
- 1998: Joyce Carol Oates
- 1999: E. L. Doctorow
- 2000: Norman Mailer
- 2001: Ernest J. Gaines
- 2002: John Updike
- 2003: Edward Albee
- 2004: Grace Paley
- 2005: Pat Conroy
- 2006: Jane Smiley
- 2007: William Kennedy
- 2008: Elmore Leonard
- 2009: Julia Alvarez
- 2010: Alice McDermott
- 2011: Maxine Hong Kingston
- 2013: Robert Olen Butler
- 2014: James Salter
- 2015: Richard Ford
- 2016: Garrison Keillor
- 2017: Annie Proulx
- 2018: Richard Russo
- 2019: Amy Tan
- 2020: Barbara Kingsolver
- 2021: John Edgar Wideman
- 2022: Richard Powers
- 2023: Jonathan Franzen
- 2024: Jesmyn Ward
- 2025: Percival Everett