Autobiography: Tim O’Brien

This American contemporary writer was born William Timothy O’Brien in Austin, Minnesota, 1946. He was born to an insurance salesman and a schoolteacher. He grew up in Austin and in Worthington, Minnesota, and attended Macalester College in St. Paul. After graduation in 1968, O’Brien was drafted. “He considered refusing to serve in the Vietnam War but believed it was wrong for someone with his advantages to dodge service while the armed forces filled up with disadvantaged young people. O’Brien saw battle as an infantryman Vietnam from 1968 to 1970 and was awarded a Purple Heart after receiving a shrapnel wound near My Lai” (Grolier ). “His awards are as followed: National Book award, 1978; National Endowment for the Arts award; Bread Loaf Writers Conference award,; Heartland Award, 1990; Melcher Book Award, 1991” (3. ) O’Brien’s wartime experiences shaped his values and perceptions. He used the violence and battle to from his stories of victory and Valier. Tim uses his wartime experience for his great works in the book we read in class, The Things They Carried. This book has such great details of everything to what the soldiers carried to the how soldiers sometimes “lose it” and just shoot anything moving. Shooting at anything moving seems like that would be more common than the exception during the war. “They blow away trees and glee clubs and whatever else there is to blow away” (O’Brien 71).

After discharge from the army, O’Brien attended Harvard for graduate studies in government and worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. In 1973, he published his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. Although he invented the dialogue, O’Brien calls the work war memoir since it describes his experience in Vietnam. He left Harvard in order to work full time as a novelist. In 1975, he published Northern Lights, a novel, Going After Cacciato, was published. This novel won the National Book Award in fiction. O’Brien has also written The Nuclear Age in 1985 and The Things They Carried in 1990. “Tim O’Brien is now a visiting professor and endowed chair at Southwest Texas State University where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program” (1.)

Tim O’Brien’s work greatly influenced work because he was in the Vietnam War. He was involved in the My Lai massacre; which I would think a lot of nightmares come from that. Maybe he has so many dreams about the war he just writes about it. I think being in a situation, like the Vietnam War, that he could write so many books and short stories.