The Author

Tim O’Brien Bio by William Hagen

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• Category: Biography
• Created on Tuesday, 15 February 2011 15:26

Born into the Baby Boomer generation in 1946, Tim O'Brien grew up during the fat economic years when parents were largely concerned with providing for their families what they themselves had lacked during the 30s and war years. His father who had distinguished himself as a sailor became an insurance salesman and his mother taught elementary school in Worthington, Minnesota, the "Turkey Capital of the World." By his own account, O'Brien had a happy childhood, playing Little League, though turning more to books in high school.

As Vietnam was ramping into an American War, O'Brien attended Macalester College in St. Paul, where he majored in political science, made good grades, and was elected student body president. Before he graduated in 1968, he had written and demonstrated against the war and supported anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. When he received his draft notice in 1969, plans to enter graduate school were put on hold and he seriously considered seeking refuge in Canada. Later, during basic training in Washington State, he again considered going AWOL into Canada. Both times he was pulled back by not wanting to turn against his entire upbringing, his family and his town. Opposed as he was to the war, he felt he did the cowardly thing when he went to Vietnam.

O'Brien served with the 46th Infantry, stationed in Quang Ngai province during 1969 through 1970 and for a time was located in My Lai, the site of the massacre of civilians that helped turn the American public against the war. His tour of duty was cut short in 1970 by shrapnel and he returned with a Purple Heart. He attended graduate school at Harvard and worked for a short time for The Washington Post.

He had begun writing his war experiences in 1969, eventually collecting them in If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, published in 1973. With its success, he was able to publish his first manuscript, Northern Lights (1975), enacting his own Vietnam conflict through two brothers, one a vet, the other a war protester, as they attempt to mend their relationship with each other and their family. Vietnam remained at the center of subsequent fiction, Going After Cacciato (1978), The Things They Carried (1990), and In the Lake of the Woods (1994), about a political candidate who has hidden his participation in My Lai. Although he had written one novel about Cold War paranoia, The Nuclear Age (1985), it's only since Woods that he has been able to "move on" to male comedy in Tomcat in Love (1998) and multiple plotting in a college reunion story, July (2002).

Going After Cacciato won the National Book Award and The Things They Carried was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Tim O’Brien currently teaches creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Texas State University-San Marcos, and lives in Austin.