Tim O'Brien: A Critical Companion

by Patrick A. Smith

Overview

After growing up in Minnesota and graduating from college, Tim O'Brien received a draft notice and joined the war effort in Vietnam. He chronicled his combat experiences in his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, and then went on to write the eight novels that are discussed in this volume. The novels reflect their characters' struggle with the effects of place, namely small-town America, in the Vietnam Era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780313330551
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/30/2005
Series:	Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Patrick A. Smith holds a B.A. in English from Penn State University and a Ph.D. in American Literature from Ohio University. He is Assistant Professor of English at Bainbridge College. His criticism, fiction, articles, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Quarter After Eight, Scribner's American Writers, Aethlon: The Jourbanal of Sport Literature, Sports Afield, Studies in Short Fiction, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and January Magazine, among other publications.

Table of Contents

Series Foreword by Katherine Gregory Klein
The Words Are All: A Brief Biography of Tim O'Brien
Creating Art from the Ashes of War: Context and Style in O'Brien's Fiction
If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (1973)
Northern Lights (1975)
Going After Cacciato (1978)
The Nuclear Age (1985)
The Things They Carried (1990)
In the Lake of the Woods (1994)
Tomcat in Love (1998)
July, July
Bibliography
Index