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Biography

Tim O'Brien was born in 1946 in Worthington, Minnesota. He was drafted into the army in 1968 and served in Vietnam from 1969-1970 where he saw combat. Returning home, he earned an MFA and had early writing successes but left Harvard without a PhD. His novels Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990) earned him critical acclaim. Though known as a "Vietnam writer," O'Brien says his books are really about betrayal and loss of faith. Currently, he is working on a book about the pivotal year 1969 and aims to make readers believe his stories really happened through vivid storytelling.

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41 views

Biography

Tim O'Brien was born in 1946 in Worthington, Minnesota. He was drafted into the army in 1968 and served in Vietnam from 1969-1970 where he saw combat. Returning home, he earned an MFA and had early writing successes but left Harvard without a PhD. His novels Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990) earned him critical acclaim. Though known as a "Vietnam writer," O'Brien says his books are really about betrayal and loss of faith. Currently, he is working on a book about the pivotal year 1969 and aims to make readers believe his stories really happened through vivid storytelling.

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BIOGRAPHY OF TIM OBRIEN

Tim OBrien was born in 1946 in Worthington, Minnesota, a small prairie town
which he describes by saying, If you look in the dictionary under the word boring,
youll find a little pen and ink illustration of my hometown. It was a town full of
typical Kiwanis boys and holier-than-thou preachers: Mid-America, he recalls, at
a time when the country was moving out of one war and into another. The county
library was a kind of sanctuary from the relentless monotony for OBrien, and he
believes that something happened in that library that meant as much to me as anything
that happened in Vietnam.
In 1968, after graduating summa cum laude from McAlester College in St. Paul
with a degree in political science, OBrien was drafted into the army. Already involved
in anti-war demonstrations, he remembers the time prior to induction as a horrid,
confused, traumatic period the trauma of deciding whether or not to go to Canada.
Horaces old do-or-die aphorism Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori was just an
epitaph for the insane, OBrien wrote in his memoir If I Die in Combat Zone , Box Me
Up and Ship Me Home (1973), but the prospect of separation from family and friends,
and alienation from the country he knew resulted in his service with the U.S. Armys
Fifth Battalion, Forty-Sixth Infantry the America Division from January 1969
to March 1970. In a terse summary of his time in country, OBrien says, I was a
coward. I went to war.
Returning to the United States with a Purple Heart in 1970, OBrien entered a
Ph.D. program in government at Harvard. During the time he was at Harvard, he spent
two summers as a reporter for the Washington Post, learning the discipline of the
newspaper story, the importance of correct grammar and active verbs, and published
the memoir, which he calls paradoxically, less autobiography than literary imagination.
In 1975, he published his first novel, Northern Lights, my training novel, my Torrents
of Spring (acknowledging Hemingways influence). The reviews were mixed, but
OBrien left Harvard without a degree in 1976. Instead of writing my dissertation, he
commented, I was writing what I needed to write.
Going After Cacciato (1978) won the National Book Award and in spite
of its wartime setting, OBrien observed that if I were to pick up my own book and
read it, my feeling would be that I wasnt really reading a war novel Its quirky. It
goes somewhere else; it goes away from the war. It starts there and goes to Paris. A
peace novel, in a sense. Seven years later, OBriens The Nuclear Age dealt with the
Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. From the early eighties, he had also
been publishing stories in magazines, including The Things They carried in 1986,
How to Tell a True War Story in 1987, and The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong
and the Lives of the Dead in 1989. These stories formed the basis of The Things They
Carried (1990), where a narrator named Tim OBrien, who is forty-three years old
and a writer now expresses his intentions by asserting, Stories are for joining past
to the futureStories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing
to remember except the story. In an interview in 1991, OBrien disclosed, Ninety
percent or more of the material is invented, and I invented ninety percent of a new Tim
OBrien, maybe even more than that.
(continued on back

WWW.PREFACE.CALPOLY.EDU

Following In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which concerns a Vietnam veteran who carries memories
of the My Lai massacre into a political campaign in Minnesota, OBrien somewhat confounded expectations
with the novel Tomcat in Love (1998), but he insisted though I am known as a Vietnam writer, whatever that
may be, I always pegged myself more as a love writer, and in that regard Tomcat in Love is no departure at all.
Continuing, he explains:
In a general sense, all of my books are about betrayal and loss of faith.
Vietnam is an example. I mean you go over there with all these nave ideas,
believing in country and your president and your fellow man, and you find
yourself disillusioned in important waysAnd thats my terrain as a writer, that
sense of lossEvery book Ive written is about that. In Tomcat in Love, this guys
got a hole in his heart the size of Idaho, that needs filling up with love.
As for the future, OBrien is currently Writer in Residence at Southwest Texas State University in the
Creative Writing Program. In the fall of 2002 he will be on a book tour for his latest work July, July. The
subject of the book is the year 1969, which OBrien says was a big, pivotal year for me. I was wounded in
battle that year, saw friends die. It was the scariest month of my life, May of 69, but it was also a watershed year
for America. The whole hawks at the throats of doves thing going on, and battles about the war. The beginnings
of the sexual revolution and feminism. It was a huge, huge month in American history. As in his other work,
OBrien will have as his goal to try to make the reader really believe the things are happening. And I think in
The Things They Carried, I, by and large, succeeded. That book is pretty much read as: that must have happened
to that guy, in some form or another.

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