Тим О’Брайен: Жизнь и творчество американского писателя о войне во Вьетнаме.

American novelist (born 1946)
other people of the same name

Tim O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist who served as a soldier in the Vietnam War. Much of his writing is about wartime Vietnam, and his work later in life often explores the postwar lives of its veterans. In 2010, The New York Times described it as "a classic of contemporary war fiction." O'Brien wrote the war novel, Going After Cacciato (1978), which was awarded the National Book Award. O'Brien taught creative writing, holding the endowed chair at the MFA program of Texas State University–San Marcos every other academic year from 2003 to 2012.

Upon completing his tour of duty, O'Brien went to graduate school at Harvard University. Afterward he received an internship at the Washington Post. In 1973 he published his first book, a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, about his war experiences. In this memoir, O'Brien writes: "Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."

as of 2010 O'Brien lived in central Texas, raising a family and teaching full time every other year at Texas State University–San Marcos. In alternate years, he teaches several workshops to MFA students in the creative writing program. O'Brien's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

In the story "Good Form," from his collection of semi autobigraphical stories, The Things They Carried, O'Brien discusses the distinction between "story truth" (the truth of fiction) and "happening truth" (the truth of fact or occurrence), writing that "story truth is sometimes truer than happening truth." O’Brien suggests that story truth is emotional truth. In turn, the emotions created by a fictional story are sometimes truer than what results from only reading the facts. This demonstrates one aspect of O’Brien's writing style: a blurring of the usual distinction we make between fiction and reality, in that the author uses details from his own life, but frames them in a self conscious or metafictional narrative voice. By the same token, certain sets of stories in The Things They Carried seem to contradict each other, and certain stories are designed to "undo" the suspension of disbelief created in previous stories. For example, "Speaking of Courage" is followed by "Notes", which explains in what ways "Speaking of Courage" is fictional. This is another example of how O’Brien blurs the traditional distinctions we make between fact and fiction.

While O'Brien does not consider himself a spokesman for the Vietnam War, he has occasionally commented on it. Speaking years later about his upbringing and the war, O'Brien described his hometown as "a town that congratulates itself, day after day, on its own ignorance of the world: a town that got us into Vietnam. Uh, the people in that town sent me to that war, you know, couldn't spell the word 'Hanoi' if you spotted them three vowels." Contrasting the continuing American search for U. S. MIA/POWs in Vietnam with the reality of the high number of Vietnamese war dead, he describes the American perspective as
A perverse and outrageous double standard. What if things were reversed? What if the Vietnamese were to ask us, or to require us, to locate and identify each of their own MIAs? Numbers alone make it impossible: 100,000 is a conservative estimate. Maybe double that. Maybe triple. From my own sliver of experience—one year at war, one set of eyes—I can testify to the lasting anonymity of a great many Vietnamese dead. O'Brien was interviewed for Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War as well as Ken Burns's 2017 documentary series The Vietnam War.