Tim O'Brien (author)
Tim O'Brien | |
---|---|
Sergeant | |
Unit | 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment 198th Infantry Brigade |
Battles/wars | Vietnam War |
Awards | Purple Heart |
Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam,[1] and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.[2]
O'Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by his wartime experiences.[3] In 2010, The New York Times described it as "a classic of contemporary war fiction."[4][5] O'Brien wrote the war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which was awarded the National Book Award.
O'Brien taught creative writing, holding the endowed chair at the
Biography
Early life
Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota on October 1, 1946,[6] the son of William Timothy O'Brien and Ava Eleanor Schultz O'Brien.[1] When he was ten, his family –including a younger brother and sister– 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.
Military service
O'Brien earned his BA in 1968 in
First book published
Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went to graduate school at
Personal life
As of 2010[update] O'Brien lived in central Texas, raising a family and teaching full-time every other year at
O'Brien's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Writing style
In the story "Good Form," from his collection of semi-autobigraphical stories, 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." O’Brien suggests that story truth is emotional truth. In turn, the emotions created by a fictional story are sometimes truer than what results from only reading the facts.
This demonstrates one aspect of O’Brien's writing style: a blurring of the usual distinction we make between fiction and reality, in that the author uses details from his own life, but frames them in a self-conscious or
By the same token, 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] This is another example of how O’Brien blurs the traditional distinctions we make between fact and fiction.
Personal views on the Vietnam War
While O'Brien does not consider himself a spokesman for the Vietnam 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."[10]
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.[11]
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 the Outstanding Book of 1973 by the New York Times.[6]
- O'Brien won the 1979 National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato.[2]
- O'Brien received the Vietnam Veterans of America Excellence in the Arts Award in 1987 [12]
- His novel James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fictionin 1995.
- In August 2012, O'Brien received the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award.[15]
- In 2010, O'Brien received the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) from Whittier College.[16]
Selected bibliography
Fiction
- Novels
- ISBN 9780440066644
- ISBN 9780385283496
- ISBN 9780394542867
- ISBN 9780618706419
- ISBN 9780140250947
- ISBN 9780767902021
- ISBN 978-0-547-52372-9
- America Fantastica (2023)
Memoirs
- ISBN 9780767904438
- Dad's Maybe Book (2019) ISBN 9780618039708
Other works
- "Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?" (1975) - short story
References
- ^ a b "Tim O'Brien |". Gale - Databases Explored.
- ^ a b "National Book Awards – 1979". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-29.
(With essay by Marie Myung-Ok Lee from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ Conan, Neal (March 24, 2010). "'The Things They Carried,' 20 Years On". Talk of the Nation. NPR.
- ^ Kakutani, Michiko (September 7, 2012). "Soldiering Amid Hyacinths and Horror". The New York Times.
- ^ "Shorts". WNYC. March 21, 2010. Archived from the original on January 16, 2013.
- ^ a b "Tim O'Brien". Minnesota Author Biographies. Minnesota Historical Society. Archived from the original on December 31, 2014. Retrieved August 19, 2011.
- ^ "Tim Obrien: A Storyteller For the War That Won't End". The New York Times. April 3, 1990.
- ^ "Rising Star Tim O'Brien: Texas State University". Txstate.edu. August 19, 2010. Archived from the original on September 30, 2012. Retrieved September 14, 2011.
- ^ "The Things They Carried". Spark Notes. Retrieved February 26, 2015.
- ^ "Writing Vietnam – Tim O'Brien Lecture Transcript". Stg.brown.edu. April 21, 1999. Retrieved August 19, 2011.
- ^ O'Brien, Tim (October 2, 1994). "The Vietnam in Me". The New York Times.
- ^ "The New York Times: Book Review Search Article". archive.nytimes.com.
- ^ Sewell, Dan (August 1, 2012). "Minn. native O'Brien wins prestigious literary lifetime achievement award". Star Tribune. Archived from the original on December 3, 2014.
- ^ LLC, D. Verne Morland, Digital Stationery International. "Dayton Literary Peace Prize - Tim O'Brien, 2012 Recipient of the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award".
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ "Award announcement 2013". Pritzker Military Library Literature Award. June 25, 2013. Retrieved November 22, 2013.
- ^ "Honorary Degrees | Whittier College". www.whittier.edu. Retrieved December 6, 2019.
- ISBN 1-60938-467-9.
- ^ "Will the real Tim O'Brien please stand up?". LiteraryYard.com. March 29, 2013.
- ^ Hawley, Noah (October 23, 2023). "Lying All the Way to the Bank in 'America Fantastica'". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 23, 2023.
- ^ "America Fantastica". HarperCollins.
External links
- A Crisis 'In Country': An Ecocritical Approach to Tim O'Brien's Fiction, Rosalind Poppleton, University of Hertfordshire, British Library (2000)
- "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