Born and raised in Minnesota, William Timothy O’Brien (1946-) grew up in a middle-class family in the town of Worthington, where his father was a life-insurance salesman and his mother a housewife. After graduating summa cum laude from Macalester College in St. Paul in 1968, O’Brien was drafted into the U.S. Army. From January 1969 to March 1970, he served in Vietnam, mostly as a combat infantry soldier. O’Brien subsequently pursued graduate studies in government at Harvard University. He also worked as a reporter and began writing about his war experiences, which have continued to inspire his literary output. His novels include If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973), Going after Cacciato (1978), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), and Tomcat in Love (1998). O’Brien has won numerous prizes for his works, including a National Book Award (1979) for Going After Cacciato. Like that novel, The Things They Carried is heavily autobiographical, with more or less fictionalized characters and episodes closely based on O’Brien’s own war-related memories. Unlike O’Brien’s other books, however, The Things They Carried features a narrator named Tim O’Brien, whose life closely resembles—but is not identical to— that of the author himself.
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