Tim O'Brien

O'Brien grew up in small-town Minnesota, opposed the Vietnam War, and nearly fled to Canada before his draft notice arrived, a decision he called cowardice for going, and wrote about for the rest of his career. He served as an infantryman in the same region where the My Lai massacre had occurred a year earlier.

Going After Cacciato, in which a platoon imagines chasing a deserter walking to Paris, won the National Book Award in 1979. The Things They Carried, blending memoir and invention so thoroughly that O'Brien insists on calling it fiction regardless of what actually happened, became the genre-defining book of the war, teaching that 'story-truth' can matter more than 'happening-truth.'

He has taught creative writing at Texas State University for decades, still returning obsessively to the war that never let him go.