News Release
August 2004
Bethlehem, Pa.—Award–winning novelist Tim O’Brien
will address freshmen students at Moravian College’s orientation
program on Sunday, August 29. The incoming class of 2008 were
assigned O’Brien’s book, The
Things They Carried,
as their common reading this summer.
O’Brien is the author of Going
After Cacciato, which
received the National Book Award in fiction, and The
Things They Carried, which won France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger
and was also a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Critics Circle Award. In 1987, he received the National
Magazine Award for The Things They Carried, and in 1999 the same
story was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stores
of the Century edited by John Updike.
In the novel, Lake of the
Woods, a work of fiction published
in 1994, he received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the
Society of American Historians and was named best novel of the
year by Time magazine.
Other books include If I
Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The
Nuclear Age, Tomcat in Love and July, July. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary
and popular magazines, including the New
Yorker, Esquire, Haper’s,
The Atlantic, Playboy, and Ploughshares, and in several editions
of The Best American Short Stories and The
O. Henry Prize Stories.
O’Brien was born in Austin, Minnesota
and graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968.
He served as an infantryman with the U.S. Army in Vietnam,
after which he pursued graduate studies in Government at Harvard
University. He worked as a national affairs reporter for The
Washington Post. He is the recipient of literary awards from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation,
and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been elected
to both the Society of American Historians and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. Currently he holds the Roy F.
and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State
University.
