Tim o'brien family
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Tim O'Brien Biography
William Timothy O'Brien was born on October 1, 1946, in Minnesota. He grew up in Worthington, Minnesota, which so deeply affected his sense of place that it became the setting for many of his short stories in The Things They Carried (1990). O'Brien attended Macalester College, graduating with a bachelor‘s degree in Political Science in 1968. Directly after college, however, O'Brien was drafted into the Vietnam War, and he served in the United States Army for two years.
O'Brien served in the 23rd Infantry Division, also known as the Americal Division. The year before O'Brien was drafted into the war, a platoon from this unit perpetrated the My Lai Massacre. Unarmed Vietnam civilians, including men, women, and children, were brutalized and murdered in the massacre. Although O'Brien wasn't involved in the army at that point, the event impacted his identity as a Vietnam veteran significantly. He reflects on the massacre and the trauma that it inflicted in his 1994 novel In the Lake of the Woods.
O'Brien's identity as a war author centers around his
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Tim O’Brien Biography
“Storytelling is the essential human activity. The harder the situation, the more essential it is. In Vietnam men were constantly telling one another stories about the war. Our unit lost a lot of guys around My Lai, but the stories they told stay around after them. I would be mad not to tell the stories I know.”—Tim O’Brien
Award-winning author Tim O’Brien is best known for his fictional portrayals of the Vietnam conflict. He was born in 1946 in Austin, Minn., and spent most of his youth in the small town of Worthington, Minn. He graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968. From February 1969 to March 1970 he served as infantryman with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, after which he pursued graduate studies in government at Harvard University. He worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post from 1973 to 1974.
Tim O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, which received the National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which received France’s prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was also a f
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Tim O'Brien (author)
Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam,[1] and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans.
O'Brien is perhaps best known for his book The Things They Carried (1990), a collection of linked semi-autobiographical stories inspired by his wartime experiences.[2] In 2010, The New York Times described it as "a classic of contemporary war fiction."[3][4] O'Brien wrote the war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which was awarded the National Book Award.
O'Brien taught creative writing, holding the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003 to 2012.
Biography
[change | change source]Early life
[change | change source]Tim O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota on October 1, 1946,[5] the son of William Timothy O'Brien and Ava Eleanor Schultz O'Brien.[1] When he was ten, his family – including
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