THE THINGS THEY CARRIED SERIES

“The Things They Carried” recounts the experiences of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s infantry unit leading up to and following the death of one of the men, Ted Lavender, on April 16. The most recent, Tomcat in Love was published in 1998 after a well-documented period of personal turmoil and artistic burnout. In addition to The Things They Carried, the collection of interrelated stories that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, O’Brien has published five novels. Since its publication in 1973, O’Brien has been a full-time writer and Vietnam a constant theme.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED SERIES

O’Brien wrote his first book, the autobiographical series of vignettes If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home while a graduate student in government at Harvard University. Despite being awarded the Purple Heart for wounds he received, O’Brien loathed the war and everything about it, but it would become the catalyst and continuing inspiration for his literary career. Resisting the impulse to defect to Canada, the twenty-two-year-old O’Brien found himself in the infantry.

After graduating with a degree in political science and plans to reform government from the inside, O’Brien was drafted instead. Paul, however, he found a place in the antiwar movement and attended war protests and peace vigils. When he was a student at Macalester College in St. Born October 2, 1946, and raised in the small town of Wortington, Minnesota, by his insurance salesman father and elementary school teacher mother, O’Brien’s childhood and adolescence was marked by loneliness and isolation. O’Brien’s life resembles many of his protagonists. His last two novels are set in the United States but still prominently feature the Vietnam veteran’s experience. When O’Brien published the disturbing and confessional article “The Vietnam in Me” in the New York Times Magazine in 1994, he sparked renewed interest in the connections between his life and his writing. Though O’Brien has made it clear in interviews that he believes the truth in literature has nothing to do with what actually happened, the similarities between his writing and his experience in Vietnam are striking. The book quickly established O’Brien as one of the leading figures in Vietnam literature.Ĭritics and readers alike have paid considerable attention to the question of whether the events in the book are literally true or products of O’Brien’s imagination. Since Tim O’Brien had already established himself as a literary voice to be reckoned with, this collection of interrelated stories received a great deal of attention.

First published in Esquire in August, 1986, and later collected in The Best American Short Stories 1987, “The Things They Carried” became the lead story in a book of the same name published in 1990 by Viking Penguin.

The things they carried