O'Brien was born 1946 in Austin, Minnesota, the oldest of three children; his father was an insurance salesman who had fought at Iwo Jima and Okinawa and his mother an elementary school teacher.

O'Brien was drafted into the Army in August, 1968. When he was classified as an infantryman he seriously considered going to Canada.

1969-70—served as an infantryman in Quang Ngai Province; his platoon had been stationed in My Lai a year after the massacre there; he was awarded the Purple Heart for a wound he got from shrapnel from a hand grenade

1970-75 studied government at Harvard but never finished; during this same period he interned for Washington Post for two summers later worked there full-time.

During his Vietnam tour, O'Brien began jotting down stories about the war at least in part to cope with it. He says that had he not gone to Vietnam he might not have become a writer.

Much of what O'Brien writes is metafiction, i.e., fiction that discusses the function and effect of storytelling

He believes that storytelling truth is often truer than the “real” truth and that people create and live their lives with the help of memory and imagination.

O'Brien's central theme is the theme of courage; he equates courage with having moral integrity and strength to take control of one's life and do what he knows to be ethically right.

All of his books deal in part with a character's willingness or unwillingness to serve in Vietnam and raise the question of which choice is the most brave and decent.

• If I Die in a Combat Zone Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973) , a memoir based on articles he wrote for his hometown newspaper while he was in Vietnam
• Going After Cacciato (1978) , winner of the National Book Award
  • This novel has often been called the best work of fiction to come out of the Vietnam War, but has been surpassed in many readers’ minds by his own more recent The Things They Carried
• The Things They Carried (1990), a series of interrelated short stories and sketches
  • finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award
• In the Lake of the Woods (1994)about a failed politician whose wife disappears under mysterious circumstances
  • made into a TV movie in 1996
• July, July (2002), about a 30th college reunion

InfoMarks (About InfoMarks)

• "Tim O'Brien" in American Writers
• "(William) Tim(othy) O'Brien" in Contemporary Authors Online
• "Tim O'Brien" in Contemporary Literary Criticism
• "Tim O'Brien" in Dictionary of Literary Biography

Links

• Tim O'Brien, Novelist, the author's home page