Tim O'Brien program transcript.pdf

Tim O'Brien, War and Literary Fiction

Pritzker Literature Award recipient Tim O'Brien discusses his career and work in this session from the 2017 ON WAR Military History Symposium.

Tim O’Brien is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War and a best-selling fiction writer. He has made a career of writing semi-fictional books inspired by the horrors he witnessed in Vietnam, including “Going after Cacciato” –which won the National Book Award in 1979- and “The Things They Carried,” He is the winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the National Magazine Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award. His short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Century and in publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Esquire. Most recently O’Brien served as a contributor to the widely acclaimed Ken Burns and Lynn Novick PBS documentary, “The Vietnam War”. His work was recognized by the Society of American Historians, who awarded him the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for “In the Lake of the Woods”, which was also recognized as Time magazine’s Best Book of the Year in 1994.