Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American writer whose work centres on the Vietnam War, in which he served as an infantry soldier. Belonging to a generation that faced the draft and the protests against the conflict, he has become one of the most read authors of the war, admired both by readers seeking testimony and by those interested in the limits of fiction.

He grew up in Worthington, a small town in southwestern Minnesota that later appears in several of his stories. He studied political science at Macalester College, where he led the student body, and was drafted and sent to Vietnam in 1968. After being wounded by shrapnel and receiving a Purple Heart, he returned home and resumed his studies at Harvard. His first book, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), launched a career in which the experience of war is always entangled with questions about how to tell it.

His style pairs plain prose with a constant awareness of the act of narration. In The Things They Carried (1990) he blurs the line between fact and invention, arguing that a story can be truer than what actually happened. He has also written about the trauma that lingers after combat and the difficulty of conveying it to those who never went. His legacy lies in renewing American war fiction and in his influence on the teaching of creative writing.