Tim O’Brien spent the most important years of his childhood in the small town of Worthington, Minnesota.  That had a significant impact on his imagination, his value system and ultimately on the elements that made him a writer.  He’s best known for his earliest works, novels taken in large part from his experiences in Vietnam.  O’Brien was once dubbed the best writer of that generation.  He won the National Book Award for his Novel Going After Caccciato, though that work has been eclipsed in popularity by his later book, the critically acclaimed The Things They Carried. 

When he’s not writing fiction he teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.  Here are some excerpts from our interview with Tim O’Brien in 2006.

Video 1   The Library.
Tim talks about how growing up Worthington, Minnesota, and particularly the hours he spent in the local library shaped him into the writer he would become.

Video 2   Vietnam as a setting.
His best known stories are set in, and are about the Vietnam War, but Tim says they are really about bigger issues that us all in our every day lives.

Video 3   The Mirror.
Tim muses on his battles with the bathroom mirror over being a writer and the struggle to write well.

Video 4   The Things They Carried.
Tim reads an excerpt from his novel.

Works by Tim O’Brien:

If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
(1973)

Northern Lights
(1975)

Going After Cacciato
(1978)

The Nuclear Age
(1985)

The Things They Carried
(1990)

In the Lake of the Woods
(1994)

Tomcat in Love
(1998)

July, July
(2002)