Conversations with Tim O'Brien by Smith Patrick A.;

Author:Smith, Patrick A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Tim O’Brien Interview

Tobey C. Herzog/1995

Excerpted from South Carolina Review 31.1 (1998): 78–109. A version of this interview also appeared in Writing Vietnam, Writing Life (U of Iowa P, 2008). Reprinted with permission of Clemson University Digital Press.

This published interview with author Tim O’Brien is based on approximately seven hours of conversation I had with the author on July 9 and 10, 1995, in his apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My purpose for the interview was to gather biographical and literary information for my book on O’Brien (Tim O’Brien, Twayne’s United States Authors Series, 1997). As a result, I divided my questions into those related to O’Brien’s roles as a son, soldier, and author. Within these categories, we discussed a wide range of subjects including O’Brien’s childhood, adolescence, and college years at Macalester; his tour of duty in Vietnam and his attitudes toward this war; his years as a graduate student at Harvard; his development as an author; his process and goals for writing fiction; and key underlying themes in his books. Although we discussed all of O’Brien’s six books and a few of his essays and short stories, my particular focus was on his most recent novel, In the Lake of the Woods (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

For this condensed version of the interview, I have eliminated dated information, O’Brien’s off-the-record comments, some information appearing in other published interviews, and exchanges unrelated to the focus of this published version of our conversation. Also, in a few places, I have shortened some of O’Brien’s responses and altered the order of questions during the two days to create a greater unity and coherence for this published interview. My purpose is to illustrate the intimate relationship between O’Brien’s life and his writing, the significant thematic and structural interconnections of his works, and the underlying mystery and ambiguity in his life and writing.

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