'Witness to War': World War II, In Voices

A Metro Atlanta businessman has started a foundation to help preserve the memories of World War II -- by interviewing the men and women who were there.

IRAQ eyewitness A collection of user-submitted videos made by or featuring Iraq War participants and eyewitness observers.    

Originally published October 19, 1994 in the Baltimore City Paper.

http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/author-interviews/tim-obrien/

Texas State University http://www.txstate.edu/rising-stars/tim-obrien.html

Tim's personal website http://www.illyria.com/tobhp.html

Readers and critics have disagreed about appropriate descriptions for the creative and unconventional form and content of The Things They Carried, O’Brien’s fifth book. Is it a collection of short stories, a short-story cycle, a series of loosely connected vignettes (similar to his nonfictional If I Die in a Combat Zone), or a unified novel emerging from twenty-two stories carefully linked through style, structure, content, themes, narrative iteration, and a first-person narrator? Is it, as the author claims, an anti-Vietnam war book? Is it a thinly veiled nonfiction war autobiography of soldier-author Tim O’Brien as told through the words of a forty-three-year-old soldier-author who also happens to be named “Tim O’Brien”? The real O’Brien, in responding to this last question about autobiographical connections, notes that the use of his own name in the book emerged from a serendipitous moment of emotional intensity rather than from a conscious decision on his part to create a narrator who was the author’s alter ego. More important, according to O’Brien, in using these interrelated sections of facts, story, confession, commentary, and narration of other people’s experiences, he forced himself to invent a new form that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, short story and novel, memory and imagination.

"Tim OBrien (1946 - )." The Columbia Companion to the Twentieth-Century American Short Story. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Credo Reference. 29 April 2009 http://www.credoreference.com/

Rebecca Sewell Homan employeed 23 years by GSC.

Archivist, Bibliographer, and Associate Professor.

MLIS 1980, MEd 2007