Conversations with Tim O'Brien

Chronology

xxi Chronology 1946 William Timothy O’Brien, Jr., born 1 October to William Timothy , an insurance salesman and World War II veteran, and Ava E. Schultz O’Brien, an elementary-school teacher and former WAVE, in Austin, Minnesota. A sister and a brother would follow. 1956 Moves with family to Worthington, Minnesota, “The Turkey Capital of the World.” O’Brien would describe—and question—his Midwestern upbringing in some detail in his Vietnam memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone. Around this time O’Brien, an avid reader and amateur magician, writes his first fiction, a short story titled “Timmy of the Little League.” 1964 Enrolls in Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the fall of the year. O’Brien would become an honors student and studentbody president. Macalester inspired the setting for O’Brien’s later novel, July, July. 1967 Travels abroad in Europe, including Prague, Czechoslovakia, and begins a novel. Campaigns for Senator Eugene McCarthy, who runs for president as an anti–Vietnam War candidate. 1968 Graduates Phi Beta Kappa from Macalester College. While working at a local golf course, O’Brien receives a draft notice. After briefly considering ignoring the notice, he reports to the Army in August. 1969 Begins tour of duty in Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province after the infamous My Lai massacre in the same area the previous March claimed some five hundred Vietnamese lives. While there, he publishes vignettes based on his experience in the Minneapolis Star and the Worthington Daily Globe. O’Brien receives a Purple Heart for a shrapnel wound sustained from an exploding grenade and Bronze Star for rescuing a fellow soldier. 1970 In March, returns from Vietnam holding the rank of sergeant. In September, O’Brien begins a Ph.D. program in government at Harvard and starts work on a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. O’Brien would leave the university six xxii CHRONOLOGY years later without finishing his dissertation, although he would continue to live in and near Cambridge, Massachusetts, for much of the next three decades. Playboy publishes a short piece about landmines called “Step Lightly,” which would appear later in If I Die. 1971 Brought on as a summer intern at the Washington Post, a position he would hold the following summer as well. 1973 Based on internship experience, hired as national affairs reporter for the Post and covers national and international stories. Early that year, after establishing a relationship with legendary editor Seymour Lawrence, publishes If I Die, about which Annie Gottlieb writes in the New York Times, “It is a beautiful, painful book, arousing pity and fear for the daily realities of a modern disaster.” O’Brien marries Ann Weller, an editorial assistant at Little, Brown. 1975 Northern Lights published. O’Brien himself would later take the book to task for its “gratuitous repetition,” the work of a beginning novelist, and consider revising the book at various points during the next three decades. 1976 Wins first of four O. Henry Memorial awards for “Night March,” a piece excerpted from the forthcoming novel Going After Cacciato. 1978 Going After Cacciato published to immediate and widespread critical acclaim. “Speaking of Courage,” another story excerpted from the novel, wins a second O. Henry Award for O’Brien. The novel won the National Book Award, beating out the favorite, John Irving ’s The World According to Garp. 1982 Garners a third O. Henry award for “Ghost Soldiers,” a story originally published in Esquire. 1985 The Nuclear Age published. 1989 “The Things They Carried,” the eponymous piece in the forthcoming short-story cycle, wins a National Magazine Award in Fiction. 1990 The Things They Carried published to widespread acclaim. The novel would be shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award and win both the Melcher Award and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. 1994 In the Lake of the Woods published. The novel won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. O’Brien speaks publicly about his decision to give up writing. He returns to Vietnam for the first time since the war and in October writes “The Vietnam in Me,” a lengthy essay ruminating on his experiences in country and a failed long-term relationship, for the New York Times. “Last night suicide was on CHRONOLOGY xxiii my mind,” O’Brien writes. “Not whether, but how.” Within nine...