Author Study

Tim O’Brien
 Tim O’Brien
• born October 1, 1946 in
Minnesota
• American novelist who mainly
writes about his experiences in
the Vietnam War and the impact
the war had on the American
soldiers who fought there.
 Life
• born in Austin Minnesota
• about 20,000 people.
• When O'Brien was twelve, his family,
including a younger sister and brother,
moved to Worthington, Minnesota, a place
that once billed itself as "the turkey capital
of the world."
 Life
• Worthington
 Life
• He earned his BA in Political Science in
1968.
• Same year he was drafted into the Army
and was sent to Vietnam, where he served
from 1968 to 1970, as an infantry foot
soldier.
• O'Brien's tour of duty was 1969-70.
• He served in a division of which a platoon
participated in the infamous
My Lai Massacre.
 Career
• Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went
on to graduate school at Harvard and received
an internship at the Washington Post.
• Writing career launched in 1973 with the release
of If I Die in a Combat Zone about his war
experiences.
• In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot
soldier teach anything important about war,
merely for having been there? I think not. He can
tell war stories."
 Writing
• One attribute in O'Brien's work is the blur
between fiction and reality; labeled
"verisimilitude."
• Work contains actual details of the
situations he experienced;
• HIs conscious, explicit, and metafictional
approach to the distinction between fiction
and fact is extraordinary
 Writing
• O'Brien casts a distinction between "story-
truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening-
truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence)
• "story-truth is sometimes truer than
happening-truth."
• Story truth is emotional truth; thus the
feeling created by a fictional story is
sometimes truer than what results from
reading the facts
 On The Rainy River
• As you read this short story by Tim
O’Brien (pg 70), think about whether or not
knowing something about an author’s
background helps you understand the
text.