Tim O’Brien

“A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.”  ― Tim O'Brien

Roxanne Kooiman

Deanna Meggitt

Amanda Knapp

Adam Nobello

Henry Bona

Mollie Ahlf

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Composition 2 1022 57/59

Tim O’Brien is an American fiction writer who has incorporated his experiences while serving in the Vietnam War into all of his writing. O’Brien has said that the war is what inspired him to be a writer and without having served, he may not have any of the work he does. He has said that a recurring theme in his work is courage and the struggle between a character’s emotions towards the war appears in many of his books. O’Brien has said that blurring the lines between the real truth and storytelling truth is more effective in creating characters because the emotion is rawer, this style is called metafiction.

O’Brien was born October 1st,1946, in Austin, Minnesota. When he was twelve years old his family moved to Worthington, Minnesota with his three younger brothers. His father was an insurance salesman, who fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa during the second world war. His mother was a elementary school teacher.

Growing up in Worthington had a influence on O'Brien's later writings. He would use the settings in some of his later work including “The Things They Carried.”

O’Brien attended Macalester college in Saint Paul, Minnesota where he received a BA in Political Science. He was the Student Body President in 1968, one year before he received his draft notice for the Vietnam war.

O’Brien was against the war, but reported for service.

O’Brien served with the 3rd platoon, A Co., 5 Battalion, 46th Infantry from 1968 to 1970. He was deployed in Vietnam from 1969 – 1970.

He would receive a Combat Infantryman Badge, which is given to those who personally fought in active ground combat.

O’Brien’s unit has been called the “unlucky” American division for its part in the 1968 My Lai massacre, one year before O’Brien was deployed in Vietnam. O’Brien would later arrive in the area, and he wondered why the place was so hostile. He was not aware that a massacre of more than 500 civilians took place a year before, until the news broke. He would later write about those event in his book “In the Lake of the Woods.”

To O’Brien, the Vietnam War was the most crucial time of his life. This can be seen in much of his work.

After Vietnam, he enrolled in Graduate school at Harvard University, seeking to obtain a Ph.D. in Government, but eventually dropped out to work for the Washington post (1971-74). He was able to report from the White House and Congress.

Eventually, he decided that he wanted to be a novelist. He states that “The Wasington Post was great training for being a writer. I learned brevity and how to organize a story, how to write a lead. I learned what to put in and what to leave out.”

In 1973, O’Brien’s first memoir was published, titled If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. It ended up being one of the first books about Vietnam written by a combatant.

It was also one of the first writings in the genre now called "creative nonfiction.

O’Brien has written 7 novels, 1 memoir and some short stories. Among these works, Going After Cacciato earned the National Book Award in fiction. The Things They Carried earned the France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, earned the National Magazine Award and was included in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. In The Lake of the Woods earned the James Fenimore Cooper Prize, and was named the best novel of the year by Time Magazine.

After years as an author, O’Brien has received multiple awards and now resides in Texas as a teacher at Texas State University where he teaches creative writing. One of his colleagues is Dagoberto Gilb, author of the short story “Love in L.A.”O’Brien has reached success as a writer because he is able to use his experiences in the Vietnam War to draw human emotion out of fiction and intertwine subjects, such as courage, that are relatable to many readers.

“Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.” ― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

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) The Nuclear Age (1985) The Things They Carried (1990) In the Lake of the Woods (1994) Tomcat in Love (1998) July, July (2002)

A list of Tim O’Brien’s work:

http://www.txstate.edu/rising-stars/tim-obrien.html http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum72.html http://www.illyria.com/tobhp.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_O'Brien_(author) http://www.history.com/topics/tim-obrien http://preface.calpoly.edu/pdf/archives/2002/biography.pdf http://gradesaver.com/author/tim-obrien/ http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Tim_O

%27Brien_(author) http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/64344.stm http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/guides/

authors/obrien.htm

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