Tim O'Brien

Tim O’Brien, born October 1, 1946, is an American novelist whose work grew out of the Vietnam War and the difficult years that followed it. He was born in Austin, Minnesota, to William Timothy O’Brien and Ava Eleanor Schult O’Brien. When he was ten, his family moved to Worthington, Minnesota, a town on Lake Okabena that had a strong influence on his imagination and later appeared as a setting in some of his stories, especially in The Things They Carried.

O’Brien came of age during the Vietnam era. He earned a BA in political science from Macalester College in 1968 and served as student body president. That same year, he was drafted into the United States Army and sent to Vietnam. From 1969 to 1970 he served in 3rd Platoon, Company A, 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment, part of the 23rd Infantry Division. His unit operated in the area around My Lai, known to U.S. forces as “Pinkville,” without knowing at first that a massacre had taken place there the year before. O’Brien later received a Purple Heart after being struck by shrapnel in a grenade attack.

Before he entered the Army, O’Brien was opposed to the war and felt sharply divided about what to do. He spent the summer of 1968 working in a meatpacking plant while worrying about his draft notice, a period he later described as physically exhausting and emotionally draining. In talks and essays, he remembered feeling pulled between anti-war convictions and the pressure of family expectations, hometown loyalties, and fear of being seen as a coward. That tension became central to the way he wrote about war, moral pressure, memory, and fear.

After completing his tour of duty, O’Brien attended graduate school at Harvard University and later received an internship at the Washington Post. In 1973 he published his first book, the memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, about his war experiences. He went on to write Going After Cacciato, a war novel published in 1978 that won the National Book Award. He is best known for The Things They Carried, published in 1990, a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by his wartime experiences. In 2010, The New York Times described it as “a classic of contemporary war fiction.”

O’Brien’s writing is marked by its open questioning of fact, fiction, and memory. He has said that his early interest in storytelling was influenced by family history, especially his father’s published accounts of World War II. In The Things They Carried, he draws a distinction between “story-truth” and “happening-truth,” using fiction to reach emotional truths that plain record may not capture. One line from “Good Form” captures that method: “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”

O’Brien also taught creative writing, holding the endowed chair in the MFA program at Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003 to 2012. He was involved in the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he worked across a range of literary traditions. Later in life, his writing often turned toward the postwar lives of veterans and, after becoming a father, toward family. Dad’s Maybe Book, titled by his son Tad, reflects on storytelling as a connection across generations. His words still resonate because they speak plainly about fear, duty, memory, and the hard work of telling the truth when truth itself feels unstable.