About The Things They Carried

Author: Tim O'Brien

Published: 1990

Honors: The Things They Carried received France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, and the Melcher Book Award and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This series of 22 interwoven stories relates the exploits and personalities of a fictional platoon of American soldiers in Vietnam.

The Things They Carried reads so much like a memoir that O’Brien states in the preface that what follows is a “work of fiction.” A first person narrator named Tim O’Brien underscores the intensely autobiographical tone. A compilation of interrelated vignettes, the stories stand perfectly on their own but together present a unified narrative of character and thought.

Labeling these stories war stories does not encompass their full scope. “War stories, like any good story, are finally about the human heart. About the choices we make, or fail to make. The forfeitures in our lives. Stories are to console and to inspire and to help us heal. And a good war story, in my opinion, is a story that strikes you as important, not for war content, but for its heart content.”

About the Author:
Tim O’Brien was born in 1946 in Austin, Minnesota, and spent most of his youth in the small town of Worthington, Minnesota. He was graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968. From February 1969 to March 1970 he was an infantryman with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, where he received the Purple Heart. After serving in Vietnam, he pursued graduate studies in government at Harvard University. He was a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post from 1973 to 1974.

O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, which received the National Book Award for fiction. In the Lake of the Woods, a novel published in 1994, received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named best novel of the year by Time magazine. O’Brien’s other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, Tomcat in Love, and July, July. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary and popular magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, and Ploughshares, and in several editions of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

O’Brien has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. O’Brien currently holds the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative writing at Southwest Texas State University. His most recent novel is July, July, published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin.

Critical Acclaim:

"High up on the list of best fiction about any war...A stunning performance. The overall effect of these original tales is devasting." - Robert B. Harris, New York Times Book Review

"The Things They Carried is as good as any piece of literature can get...It is controlled and wild, deep and tough, perceptive and shrewd." - Chicago Sun-Times

"You've got to read this book...In a world filled too often with numbness, or shifting values, these stories shine in a strange and opposite direction, moving against the flow, illuminating life's wonder." - Dallas Morning News

"Simply marvelous...A striking sequence of stories that twist and turn and bounce off each other." - Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek