Howard Wolf
December 25, 2020

We are pleased to cast a spotlight this week on Howard R. Wolf, Emeritus Professor and Senior Fellow in the Department of English at University at Buffalo.

Born in 1936, Howard attended the Horace Mann School in New York City before attending Amherst College where he earned a B.A.  He then went to Columbia where he earned his masters and The University of Michigan for his Ph.D. He was a full-time professor at the University at Buffalo’s English department for 40 years, from 1967 to 2007.

Wolf has lectured throughout the world as an Americanist, creative writer, and literary journalist.  One of Buffalo’s few Jewish American writers of fiction, Howard is widely published, pursuing an interest in personality in memoir form (Forgive the Father), the novel (Broadway Serenade), drama (Home at the End of the Day), and short fiction.

For the past fifteen years, he has created a character, “Ludwig Fried,” in twenty stories who, living in the shadow of the Holocaust and various kinds of displacement, struggles still, often in comic terms, despite loss, to belong somewhere.  He recently announced the collaborative publication of two novellas — Chris Helvey’s Behind The Eight Ball and his novel Of Two Lives On The Lower Golan — as one volume: ECHOES OF LOSS AND BELONGING. This innovative publication brings together two authors with vastly different backgrounds whose two novellas reveal deep and shared perceptions about the quest for “belonging.”  Their protagonists – Earl Turner and Ludwig Fried, the former a Kentucky police officer, the later a displaced Manhattanite living in Israel – both look for a place to belong in communities where they are outsiders; life in Kentucky and Israel echo each other as Earl and Ludwig try to integrate their origins and possible destinations.

Mazal Tov to Howard on his lifetime of achievement and his most recent publication which is available through Amazon here.

Howard Wolf - Howard