Born in Chicago, Stephen Wolf has loved books since childhood. He’d borrow them from the public library on Wednesdays, then on Saturdays ride his bike to the bookmobile to return them and check out more but never imagined being a writer; he wanted to play second base for the White Sox. When he chose what to study in college, his father wondered, “What’s to study? You already speak English.” Their relationship appears in some of his short stories. In high school and college he was a gymnast—later the setting of two more stories—until winning the college short story-writing contest which significantly shifted his primary focus.
Dropping out of college, he moved to New York’s Lower East Side before ever learning his grandparents had once lived only blocks away, which strengthened his sense he’d really come home. His railroad apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen had a water closet with “the chain thing” like the one behind which Clemenza taped the gun for Michael in The Godfather. For the next twenty years he was a gymnastics coach, personal fitness trainer, waiter, construction worker, bike messenger, and truck driver. He eventually returned to college and earned a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois—his dissertation on the New York School of Poets and Painters. For thirty years he’s taught college English as well as New York Studies at St. John’s University. He writes with a fountain pen in a marble composition notebook before typing a copy of it, and until writing his historical-memoir Central Park Love Song had never heard of Audrey Munson—the central character in his novel Miss Manhattan—despite seeing statues all over town for which she posed.