Tim O’Brien, author of the novel “The Things They Carried,” will appear at The College of William & Mary for a reading and reception on Thursday.
O’Brien, a former reporter for The Washington Post, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize when his novel was released. His appearance, part of the Patrick Hayes Writers Series, is free and will begin at 8 p.m. in the Commonwealth Auditorium of the Sadler Center.
O’Brien’s professional writing career began shortly after returning from Vietnam in 1970 with the Purple Heart. He served from 1968 to 1970 in the U.S. Army. He initially entered a Ph.D. program in government at Harvard University, leading to two internships at The Washington Post.
His drew upon his experiences in the war first for his 1979 novel, “Going After Cacciato,” which received the National Book Award for fiction. He is best known for “The Things They Carried,” a collection of related stories about a platoon of American soldiers first published in Esquire, then published together in hardcover in 1990. In addition to being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger.
He is known for his blurring of reality and fiction, compelling readers to suspend disbelief even as they read about real people, places and events. “I feel I can do both. I can write about the real world as I live in it, but I can also write about the world of my imagination, my fantasies, my fears, in a way that I couldn’t if I was writing non-fiction,” he told W&M News.
O’Brien spends every other year teaching full-time at Texas State University, teaching Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) students for one semester and devoting the next semester to undergraduate English classes and workshops. On alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the Creative Writing program.
When visiting campuses, he usually highlights the “stubbornness and tenacity” it takes to write. “You don’t write a novel or short story in one or two days,” he said. “It’s not like doing a college paper. You’ve got to be able to stick with it for a long, long while. That means being stubborn and not quitting at the first roadblock you come to. It means revisions, going over and over the thing, making the sentences graceful and the story clear. And that, again, takes a real tenacity that college students are very used to.”
