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Author to bring images of Vietnam to campus Sept. 20 |
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Krista M. Hayes |
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Sep 18, 2006 |
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Author Tim O’Brien will discuss his book, The Things They Carried, on Wednesday, Sept. 20, at 7 p.m. in The University of Toledo’s Student Union Auditorium.
In the novel The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s stories spring from his own personal experiences of being in the Vietnam War and his desire to distort the boundaries between reality and fiction. O’Brien gave his main character his name and uses repetition of events, such as witnessing a man getting blown up by a mine and his own attempt of trying to escape the war by fleeing to Canada, to reinforce the relationship between the soldier storyteller’s tales.
After graduating summa cum laude from McAlester College in St. Paul, Minn., with a degree of political science in 1968, O’Brien was drafted into the army. He served in the United States Army’s Fifth Battalion, 46th Infantry, from January 1969 to March 1970.
O’Brien returned to the United States with a purple heart in 1970 and entered a doctoral program in government at Harvard University. While attending Harvard, he worked two summers as a reporter for The Washington Post.
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In 1975, O’Brien published his first novel, Northern Lights, and left Harvard with a degree one year later. Other award-winning novels he has written are Going After Cacciato (1987), The Nuclear Age (1985), In the Lake of the Woods (1994), Tomcat In Love (1998) and July July (2002).
During the early 1980s, he published stories in magazines; these included “The Things They Carried” (1986), “How to Tell a True War Story” (1987), “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong” (1989) and “The Lives of the Dead” (1989). These stories later went on to help form the basis for The Things They Carried, and the novel was the winner of France’s Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger and a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
O’Brien is writer in residence at Southwest Texas State University in the Creative Writing Program. According to O’Brien, his goal in all of his work is to “try to make the reader believe the things are happening. And I think in The Things They Carried, I, by and large, succeeded. That book is pretty much read as ‘that must have happened to that guy, in some form or another.’”
Following the discussion, O’Brien will sign books.
For more information on the free, public event, contact the Student Activities Office at 419.530.7221.
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