Dec 11, 2019
Tim O'Brien is the
guest. He is the author of The Things They Carried, which
was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics
Circle Award. And he is the recipient of the 1979 National Book
Award for Fiction for his novel Going After Cacciato. His
latest book, a memoir, is called Dad's Maybe Book,
available now from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
O'Brien was born in 1946 in Austin, Minnesota, and spent most of
his youth in the small town of Worthington, Minnesota. He
graduated summa cum laude from Macalester
College in 1968. From February 1969 to March 1970 he served as
infantryman with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, after which he pursued
graduate studies in government at Harvard University. He worked as
a national affairs reporter for The Washington
Post from 1973 to 1974.
His short fiction has appeared in The New
Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The
Atlantic, Playboy,
and Ploughshares, and in several editions
of The Best American Short Stories and The O.
Henry Prize Stories. In 1987, O'Brien received the National
Magazine Award for the short story, “The Things They Carried,” and
in 1999 it was selected for inclusion in The Best American
Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. O'Brien
is the recipient of literary awards from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National
Endowment for the Arts. He has been elected to both the Society of
American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
O'Brien currently holds the University Endowed Chair in Creative
Writing at Texas State University. He lives with his wife and
children in Austin, Texas.
In today's monologue, I talk briefly about my mother-in-law, who
passed away recently.