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Biography Note: Tim O'Brien as a Child (Quote)

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Biography Note: Tim O'Brien as a Child (Quote)

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"Looking back on his childhood, O'Brien described himself as a shy and lonely youngster who had difficulty making friends. As he grew older, he used magic tricks as a way to gain approval and applause from his peers" (page 21-22) ("The Life of Tim O'Brien").

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Biography Note: O'Brien's Life in His Works (Quote)

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Biography Note: O'Brien's Life in His Works (Quote)

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"Many of the events described in The Things They Carried closely mirrored O'Brien's own experiences. In addition, many of the interrelated stories are set in O'Brien's home state of Minnesota or in Quang Ngai Province, where he was stationed during the war. Moreover, the collection features several characters who are closely based on soldiers that O'Brien met in Vietnam" (page 26-27) ("The Life of Tim O'Brien").

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Biography Note: "Returning Home" (Quote)

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Biography Note: "Returning Home" (Quote)

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"In March 1970 O'Brien was discharged from the U.S. Army with the rank of sergeant. He returned home with a purple Heart medal he received after suffering a minor shrapnel wound while out on patrol" (page 24) ("The Life of Tim O'Brien").

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Biography Note: Arriving in Vietnam (Quote)

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Biography Note: Arriving in Vietnam (Quote)

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O'Brien arrived in Vietnam in February 1969. He was assigned to an infantry unit in Quang Ngai Province, a region of central South Vietnam along the South China Sea. O'Brien soon learned that he was sent to one of the country's deadliest places. Viet Cong guerrilla fighters [who fought for Communist North Vietnam] roamed throughout the forest and villages of the region, despite the best efforts of America infantry squads and airpower" (page 23-24) ("The Life of Tim O'Brien").

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"In August 1968 after graduation from Macalester, O'Brien was drafted into the army, an event that produced a major emotional crisis for him. Finding the conflict morally reprehensible and emotionally unacceptable, he considered Canada or jail but finally did not choose flight or incarceration over Vietnam. He admits the prospect of losing friends and family and the censure of his culture overcame his personal objections, and he found himself dragged inexorably toward war. As he records in his memoir, 'in the end, it was less reason and more gravity that was the final influence'" ("Tim O'Brien." Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography).

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Biography Note: Early Life in the Midwest (Quote)

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Biography Note: Early Life in the Midwest (Quote)

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"He matured in another Minnesota town, Worthington, where his father, William Timothy O'Brien, sold life insurance and his mother, Ava, raised him, his brother, Greg, and sister, Kathy. His family life included a house full of books; as a boy O'Brien was a voracious reader who also tried his best to play little league baseball and grow into the sturdy young man his enviorment demanded. He attended Worthington Senior High School and Macalester College in St.Paul, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1968, having earned a degree in political science. Despite having lived in the Boston area since 1970, when he entered the Ph.D. program in government at Harvard, O'Brien continued to see himself as a Midwesterner. His decision to remain in the East after his early writing success, however, does reveal something about his ambivalent connection to the America of his boyhood" ("Tim O'Brien." Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography).

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Biography Note: O'Brien's Writing Themes (Quote)

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Biography Note: O'Brien's Writing Themes (Quote)

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"Beyond his war, any war, he recurrently explores a few specific subjects and themes: the continual interplay of fact and imagination in fiction and in life; the compulsive, absurd, noble quest for human truth; the difficulty in defining and obtaining the elusive quality of courage; and the ongoing human need for the fragile, made-up, explanatory device called story. Indeed O'Brien's prime theme finally is not that war maims and destroys--an obvious truism--but that storytelling explains, connects, and ultimately save the teller and the listener" ("Tim O'Brien." Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography).

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"Critics have often placed O'Brien within the somewhat limited category of "war writer." ... Indeed, it is Ernest Hemingway that a reader hears most often in much of O'Brien's work--the spare, rhythmic repetition of key words and phrases; the hard, disciplined control of idea and emotion in sentences and paragraphs that are models of the stoic understatement; the darkly ironic gestures; and the classical imperatives of courage and cowardice, transgression and expiation, of Hemingway's best stories and novels" ("Tim O'Brien." Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography).

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Biography Note: War forming a Writer (Quote)

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Biography Note: War forming a Writer (Quote)

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"Tim O'Brien, a contemporary American novelist and short-story writer of immense imaginative power and range, freely admits that the Vietnam War was the dark, jarring experience that made him a writer. ... His service in Vietnam as an infantryman with the Americal Division presented him with jarring, traumatic material, but it also made writing a need rather than a choice. Seeing the many physical and emotional atrocities; watching friends destroyed or maimed in meaningless search-and-destroy missions and village searches; battling the fear, boredom, and deadliness of America's longest war, one to which he had pronounced moral objections--all of this and more supplied O'Brien with the two great themes that have powered all of his novels and short fiction: the ongoing quest to acquire or simply to define courage and the desperate need to attain redemption after sin" ("Tim O'Brien." Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography).

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Biography Note: O'Brien's Focus Within Novels (Quote)

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Biography Note: O'Brien's Focus Within Novels (Quote)

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"In highly praised novels such as The Things They Carried, Going after Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods, he [Tim O'Brien] explores the war and its aftershocks from many vantage points, some intimate and some more distant" ("Tim O'Brien." Contemporary Authors Online).