Tim OBrien

I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile." ~Tim O'Brien

- Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist who writes about his experiences in the Vietnam War and the impact that the war had on the American soldiers who fought there. - Born in Minnesota (a setting which figures prominently in his novels), he earned his BA in Political Science in 1968. That same year he was drafted into the infantry, and was sent to Vietnam, where he served from 1969 to 1970. - When O'Brien was twelve, his family, including a younger sister and a brother, moved to Worthington, Minnesota. - Worthington had a large influence on OBriens imagination and early development as an author. The town is located on Lake Okabena in the western portion of the state and serves as the setting for some of his stories, especially those in the collection titled The Things They Carried

- Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went on to graduate school at Harvard and received an internship at the Washington Post. His writing career was launched in 1973 with the release of If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home about his war experiences.

The Things They Carried

Rena Korb wrote in her critical essay that: When his award-winning novel Going After Cacciato was published, John Updike wrote that O'Brien was reaching for a masterpiece. The Things They Carried, an intense, heartfelt, moving experience of the war, published almost a decade later, may well be that masterpiece.

Debate
Critics and readers alike have paid considerable attention to the question of whether the events in the book are literally true or products of O'Brien's imagination. Though O'Brien has made it clear in interviews that he believes the truth in literature has nothing to do with what actually happened, the similarities between his writing and his experience in Vietnam are striking. When O'Brien published the disturbing and confessional article The Vietnam in Me in the New York Times Magazine in 1994, he sparked renewed interest in the connections between his life and his writing. His last two novels are set in the United States but still prominently feature the Vietnam veteran's experience. It could be said that, in The Things They Carried, everything is true but nothing is authentic. This dichotomy is not merely an academic conceit. O'Brien himself has repeatedly made two statements, throughout the text of The Things They Carried and in interview since the book's publication: 'This is a true story' and 'Everything is made up. One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur between fiction and reality labeled verisimilitude, his work contains actual details of the situations he experienced.

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