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About the Author
 William
Timothy O'Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota, in
1946. O'Brien credits his library-board-member
father and his elementary-teacher mother with
fostering his love for books and his belief in the
power of stories to tell truths. His budding
literary interests, plus his devotion to
baseball--he played shortstop on a little league
team coached by his father--led to O'Brien's first
writing attempt at around the age of 10:
"Timothy of the Little League"!
At 18, O'Brien enrolled at Macalaster College in
St. Paul, Minnesota, where he majored in political
science. He became active in campus politics and was
elected president of the student body during his
senior year. As the Vietnam War escalated during
O'Brien's college years, he took part in some minor
anti-war demonstrations, but those demonstrations
were not yet of the intensity of the protests that
would soon rock college campuses.
The summer after O'Brien graduated from
Macalaster, he received his draft notice, and in
February 1969, he was sent to Vietnam. He served a
13-month tour of duty, during which he earned a
Purple Heart, a Bronze Star (for rescuing a wounded
comrade under fire), and the Combat Infantry Badge.
After his discharge from the Army, O'Brien
studied American military intervention at Harvard,
worked as a journalist for The Washington Post,
and continued writing about his war experiences,
which he had begun to do while still in Vietnam.
O'Brien has been hailed as "the best
American writer of his generation" (San
Francisco Chronicle). He is the author of Going
After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book
Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried,
which was named by The New York Times as one
of the ten best books of 1990, received the Chicago
Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a
finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1993, the
French edition of The Things They Carried received
the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger. His
book In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time
magazine as the best novel of 1994. The book also
received the James Fennimore Cooper Prize from the
Society of American Historians and was selected as
one of the ten best books of the year by The New
York Times.
Tim O'Brien is the 2005-2006 Roy F. and Joann
Cole Mitte Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at
Texas State University, San Marcos.
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