Tim O'Brien, a contemporary American novelist and short-story writer of immense imaginative power and range, freely admits that the Vietnam War was the dark, jarring experience that made him a writer. In a 1993 interview (unpublished) he described the...

Best known for his fictional portrayal of the Vietnam War, Tim O'Brien is an American novelist and short story writer who has been compared to Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane, and Joseph Heller. In Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They...

Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an 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. He regularly teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Texas...

Byline: Pat Rooney, Special to the Rocky We asked midfielder Ciaran O'Brien, the Rapids' first-round selection (fifth overall) in Major League Soccer's SuperDraft, to . . . Fill in the blanks You went to UC Santa Barbara and grew up...

It is a sunny Saturday in Ireland and PW has arranged to meet Tim Severin in a lively Cork City caf[acute{e}]. Severin, the explorer and writer, is traveling in from his home in remote West Cork, a beautiful, rugged region where sheep farmers...

To the Editor: One would hope that even public figures would be accorded fair and accurate treatment by The Observer. This is clearly not the case. Your Dec. 18, 2006, article entitled “The Trump Family,” by Tom Acitelli and John Koblin, paints a seriously inaccurate—indeed,...

Reviewing Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in today's New York Times, reviewer Michiko Kakutani laments that the novel's "lugubrious passages...gain ascendency as the book progresses." And Kakutani knows from ascendant lugubriousness. Six days earlier, the Pulitzer-winning critic labeled John Irving's latest work, Until...

In the following essay, Vernon considers Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried in relation to John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, viewing the former “as a mechanism for questioning the possibility of spiritual gain through waging modern war.”

In the essay below, Bonn discusses the significance of O'Brien 's persistent concerns about the relationship between fiction and experience throughout his writing career, highlighting "the effective potential of the stories" related in If I Die, Going after Cacciato, and The Things They Carried.

In the following essay, Kaplan contends that in The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien “emphasizes the magical powers of storytelling,” incorporating both factual writing and memoir to create fiction that is “truer than fact.”

A letter written to Tim O'Brien after reading his stories "Ambush" and "On the Rainy River."