Tim O'Brien

Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) is a well-known contemporary American writer of seven novels, one memoir, and numerous short stories, nonfiction essays, and reviews. He has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and selections from The Things They Carried and other works are frequently anthologized in textbooks and short-story collections, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. One of three children, O’Brien lived in his birth town of Austin, Minnesota, until the age of ten when his family relocated to Worthington, Minnesota. After a public school education, he graduated from Macalaster College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, summa cum laude with a degree in political science. Shortly after graduation, his plans for graduate school were interrupted by the Vietnam War. The United States Army drafted O’Brien, and he served in Quang Ngai Province in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. Upon his discharge from the military, O’Brien enrolled in graduate school at Harvard University, planning to study government, and worked briefly as a reporter for the Washington Post. When the short sketches that O’Brien published in magazines and newspapers while in Vietnam led to the publication of If I Die in A Combat Zone in 1973, O’Brien began a full-time writing career and left graduate school. His reputation was established in 1979 when he received the National Book Award for his second novel, Going After Cacciato (1978). In addition to that novel, his best-known work includes The Things They Carried (1990), which received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for fiction and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Estranger and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which received the novel of the year award from Time magazine and the Society of American Historians’ James Fenimore Cooper Prize for outstanding historical novel. O’Brien has also received the National Magazine Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award, as well as numerous other accolades. In 2012 he received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, and in 2013 he had the distinction of becoming the first fiction writer to receive The Pritzker Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. O’Brien is well known for blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact and for debating the issue of relative truth in his work while treating such universal subjects as love, death, the imagination, memory, the art of writing, aging, and war. While the topic of Vietnam emerges in all of O’Brien’s major works, he does not consider himself a war writer per se. Since 1999, O’Brien has taught at Texas State University at San Marcos where he holds the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative Writing. He continues to give readings and talks around the country.