Tim O'Brian

It's the birthday of American novelist Tim O'Brien (books by this author), born in Austin, Minnesota (1946). O'Brien is best known for his series of novels about Vietnam, including The Things They Carried (1990), which is now considered a staple in high school and college classrooms. O'Brien was the son of an insurance salesman and an elementary school teacher. He moved to Worthington, Minnesota, the "turkey capital of the world," and spent his childhood playing shortstop in the Ben Franklin Little League, visiting the public library, and playing army games with his friends. Worthington is located on Lake Okebena, which served as a setting for many of the scenes in The Things They Carried. He remembers being fascinated by his father's accounts of his World War II experiences at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, which had been published in the New York Times. He majored in political science at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he was also the student body president. After he graduated, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He served in Vietnam for three years in the 46th Infantry. O'Brien was hit by shrapnel during a grenade attack and received the Purple Heart. When his tour of duty was complete, he went to graduate school at Harvard University and interned at the Washington Post, where he began writing about his experiences during the war. He said: "The war was just full of stories happening to me as a soldier and to all the men around me and to the country itself and to the Vietnamese. And the war will be remembered through stories." His first book, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, was published in 1973. O'Brien published several other books, includingNorthern Lights (1975), Going After Cacciato (1978), and The Nuclear Age(1985), before publishing The Things They Carried (1990), which was an international best-seller. The book is a series of interrelated stories about Vietnam that blur fact and fiction. The narrator is even named Tim O'Brien. O'Brien says the style came to him because "I wanted to write a book that was, on the surface, you know, about Vietnam, but underneath the surface, I wanted to write about storytelling itself - 'Why do we make things up? Why don't we just report what happens in the world?'" The title of the book comes from O'Brien's pondering the physical and metaphorical weight of the war on soldiers. He says, "What we carry says a lot about the people we are . it's telling, the things that we carry." In The Things They Carried, O'Brien writes: "Every third or fourth man carried a claymore antipersonnel mine - 3.5 pounds with its firing device. They all carried fragmentation grenades - 14 ounces each. They all carried at least one M-18 colored smoke grenade - 24 ounces. Some carried CS or tear gas grenades. Some carried white phosphorous grenades. They carried all they could bear and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried." The Washington Star called The Things We Carried "the single greatest piece of work to come out of Vietnam." Tim O'Brien received the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award (2013), which carries a $100,000 purse. On writing, Tim O'Brien says: "Beyond anything, it seems to me, a writer performs this sitting-down act primarily in search of those rare, very intense moments of artistic pleasure that are as real in their way as the pleasures that can come from any other source - the rush of endorphins, for instance, that accompanies the making of a nice little bit of dialogue. And this isn't to say that writing isn't painful - and it is, most of the time - but at the same time, there is no pleasure without the pain."