Tom O'Brien Article Summary

Works Cited

Frost, Adam.  "O'Brien, Tim, 1946-"   Literary Online Biography. Copyright 1996-2010 ProQuest
     LLC.  Web. 20 Oct. 10. 
     http://lion.chadwyck.com.proxy.yc.edu/searchFullrec.do?id=3979&area=authors&forward=author&   trailId=12B3F6EFB7A&activeMultiResults=authors

 

 

Tim O’Brien 1946-

    Tim O’Brien was born on October 1, 1946 in Minnesota.  His father was a insurance salesman and his mother was a teacher.  In 1968 he graduated from Macalester College with a BA in political science.  Shortly after he graduated college he was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.  O’Brien was against war.  In The Things They Carried, there in a short story about the internal conflict he went through when he was drafted, he didn’t want to go to war.  In the end though, he did.  He served in Vietnam from 1969 through 1970.  After returning from Vietnam, he went to Harvard to work on a graduate course specializing on government and politics.
This article discusses the literary writings done by Tim O’Brien.  According to the article, all but one of O’Brien’s novels were about the Vietnam war.  The one exception was a novel titled Tomcat in Love.  This was a book about a man who was obsessed with blondes and sex.  It was the only novel written by O’Brien that was considered a “flop”.  O’Brien wrote many novels, The Things They Carried, If I Die In A Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato, and In the Lake of the Woods, are the works discussed in this article.  All four of these were acclaimed as outstanding by numerous respected critics such as The New York Times.
    I will use this article to help write a biography of  my own about the life and work of Tim O’Brien.  It will be useful to me because I have to have three sources and his gives me one of them.  It is also useful because prior to reading it, I didn’t know of any other books written by Tim O’Brien.  Knowing this information will give me a place to begin my research on his work.
    The source I used to write this summary is a credible one because I found it in the Yavapai College school library database and the college only uses credible sources.  There is some information in the article that talks about stories from one of the books O’Brien wrote that I am familiar with and the information was accurate, as are the quotes the author used in the article.  O’Brien’s date of birth, colleges he attended, and his draft into the Vietnam War are all easily accessible over the internet.