Tim O'Brien

American novelist and Vietnam War veteran whose The Things They Carried is one of the definitive literary examinations of war, memory, and storytelling.

Tim O’Brien is an American author and Vietnam War veteran whose work has grappled with the experience of that war and its moral and psychological aftermath more deeply and honestly than perhaps any other writer of his generation. He was drafted in 1968, served in the Americal Division, and came home carrying experiences that would fuel decades of fiction. His 1973 memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home was his first account of Vietnam; but it was The Things They Carried (1990) that secured his place in the American literary canon.

The Things They Carried is a genre-defying work that presents itself as a collection of linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam, narrated by a character named Tim O’Brien — but O’Brien deliberately blurs the line between fiction and memoir, truth and story-truth, making the book a profound meditation on how we tell stories about war and why narrative itself becomes a survival mechanism. The opening chapter, which catalogs the physical and emotional burdens carried by each soldier, is one of the most frequently anthologized pieces of American literature.

O’Brien also wrote Going After Cacciato, which won the National Book Award and follows a soldier who decides to walk from Vietnam to Paris; and In the Lake of the Woods, a novel about a Vietnam veteran running for the Senate whose wife disappears. His work insists on the irreducible complexity of moral experience in wartime and the inadequacy of simple narratives about heroism or cowardice.