Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien

by Alex Vernon

Overview

The first literary biography of Tim O'Brien, the preeminent American writer of Vietnam War and one of the best writers of his generation, with never-before-seen materials and interviews.

"Vietnam made me a writer." —Tim O'Brien

Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others—not to mention Tim O'Brien himself—Peace is a Shy Thing provides a nearly day-by-day, gripping account of O'Brien's thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam and gives equal diligence to reconstructing O'Brien's writing process.

Alex Vernon's comprehensive research uncovered countless gems about O'Brien's life and the journey that made him into a literary icon, including an unpublished short story about O'Brien from a college girlfriend, documentation of his comical involvement with the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, and a 1989 attic exchange between American and Vietnamese writers on the eve of the publication of O'Brien's most beloved book, The Things They Carried, years before the two countries normalized relations.

Peace is a Shy Thing is as much a history of the era as it is a story of O'Brien's life, from his small-town midwestern midcentury childhood, to winning the National Book Award and his status as literary elder statesman. A story which Vernon, a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War and a literary scholar trained by officers and professors of the Vietnam era, is uniquely suited to cover.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250358493
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

From Prairie Village, Kansas, ALEX VERNON graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (the only literature major in his class of over a thousand), served in combat as a tank platoon leader in the Persian Gulf War, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, he is the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

Editorial Reviews

"Alex Vernon has written a revelatory, insightful, and deeply moving biography of one of the most important authors of our time. Vernon beautifully illuminates the exquisite artistry and imaginative power of Tim O'Brien's work, the discipline of his craft, and the urgent moral questions he reckons with. In these pages, O'Brien—a fascinating, complicated human being and artist—comes vividly to life." —Lynn Novick and Ken Burns, filmmakers of The Vietnam War

"Tim O'Brien is one of the essential writers of his generation. More than any other records we have, his fiction documents the fissures that defined America in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the new millennium. They are also models of the highest art. In this magnificent new biography, Alex Vernon tells O'Brien's story with sympathy and an understanding of the nuances—historical, cultural, political, and personal—that made O'Brien the writer he became." —Tracy Daugherty, author of Pulitzer finalist Larry McMurtry

"Vernon, whose critical faculties are very sharp throughout, is astute in tracing O’Brien’s early inspiration to the 'moral injury' he suffered during his service in the Vietnam War, and meticulous in stitching minute details in the life to parallel details in the work. Peace Is a Shy Thing is a marvelous tapestry, in which one may finally read the answer to one of Vernon’s key questions: How do you write inscrutability?" —Madison Smartt Bell, author of Child of Light

From the Publisher