William Timothy O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist. He is best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by O'Brien's experiences in the Vietnam War.[1] In 2010, The New York Times described O'Brien's book as a Vietnam classic.[2][3] In addition, he is known for his war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), also about wartime Vietnam, and later novels about postwar lives of veterans.[4]

Tim O'Brien
O'Brien at the 2012 Texas Book Festival
Born	William Timothy O'Brien (1946-10-01) October 1, 1946 (age 75) Austin, Minnesota, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist short story writer teacher
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Macalester College Harvard University
Genre	Memoirs, war stories, short stories
Notable works	Going After Cacciato The Things They Carried If I Die in a Combat Zone
Years active	1973–present
Spouse	Meredith Baker
Children	2
Military career
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Army
Years of service	1968–1970
Rank	Sergeant
Unit	3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment 198th Infantry Brigade
Battles/wars	Vietnam War
Awards	Purple Heart

O'Brien held the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003–2004 to 2011-2012 (2003–2004, 2005–2006, 2007–2008, 2009–2010, and 2011–2012).

Life and career

Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota.[5] When he was ten, his family, including a younger sister and brother, moved to Worthington, Minnesota. Worthington had a large influence on O’Brien's imagination and his early development as an author. The town is on Lake Okabena in the southwestern part of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in The Things They Carried.

O'Brien earned his BA in 1968 in political science from Macalester College, where he was student body president. That same year he was drafted into the United States Army and was sent to Vietnam, where he served from 1969 to 1970 in 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment, part of the 23rd Infantry Division (the Americal Division) that contained the unit that perpetrated the My Lai Massacre the year before his arrival. O'Brien has said that when his unit got to the area around My Lai (referred to as "Pinkville" by the U.S. forces), "we all wondered why the place was so hostile. We did not know there had been a massacre there a year earlier. The news about that only came out later, while we were there, and then we knew."[6]

Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went to graduate school at Harvard University. Afterward he received an internship at the Washington Post. In 1973 he published his first book, a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

While O'Brien does not consider himself a spokesman about the war, he has occasionally commented on it. Speaking years later about his upbringing and the war, O'Brien described his hometown as "a town that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own ignorance of the world: a town that got us into Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that war, you know, couldn't spell the word 'Hanoi' if you spotted them three vowels."[7]

Contrasting the continuing American search for U.S. MIA/POWs in Vietnam with the reality of the high number of Vietnamese war dead, he describes the American perspective as

A perverse and outrageous double standard. What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own MIAs? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience—one year at war, one set of eyes—I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead.[8]

One attribute of O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality; labeled "verisimilitude", his work contains details of the events he encountered. His conscious, explicit, and metafictional approach to blurring the distinction between fact and fiction is a unique aspect of his style. In the story "Good Form" in The Things They Carried, O'Brien discusses the distinction between "story-truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story-truth is sometimes truer than happening-truth." He suggests that story truth is emotional truth; thus the feeling created by a fictional story is sometimes truer than what results from reading the facts. Certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories. For example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes", which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictional.[9]

O'Brien's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

O’Brien writes and lives in central Texas. He is raising a family and teaches full-time every other year at Texas State University–San Marcos. In alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the creative writing program.[10]

O'Brien was interviewed for Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War as well as Ken Burns's 2017 documentary series The Vietnam War.

Awards and honors

• If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home was named Outstanding Book of 1973 by the New York Times.[5]
• O'Brien won the 1979 National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato.[4]
• O'Brien received the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award in 1987 [11]
• His novel In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1995.
• In August 2012, O'Brien received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.[12][13] In June 2013, O'Brien was awarded the $100,000 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award.[14]
• In 2010, O'Brien received the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) from Whittier College.[15]

Works

• If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973)
• Northern Lights (1975)
• "Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?" (1975)
• Going After Cacciato (1978) ISBN 9780385283496
• The Nuclear Age (1985) ISBN 9780394542867
• The Things They Carried (1990) ISBN 9780618706419
• In the Lake of the Woods (1994) ISBN 9780140250947
• Tomcat in Love (1998)
• July, July (2002)[16]
• Dad's Maybe Book (2019)

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Tim O'Brien.

• A Crisis 'In Country': An Ecocritical Approach to Tim O'Brien's Fiction, Rosalind Poppleton, University of Hertfordshire, British Library (2000)
• Website Dedicated to O'Brien's work
• "Tim O'Brien video interview" (2010), on Big Think
• Online discussion of The Things They Carried, Book Talk
• Tim O'Brien Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
• Tim O'Brien, at Writers Reflect, Ransom Center
• Participation in Pritzker Military Museum & Library's Military History Symposium
• Tim O'Brien at Library of Congress Authorities — with 19 catalog records
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• "How To Tell a True War Story" BBC TV Documentary, 1992

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