Tim O’Brien is an award-winning author, perhaps best known for his fictional portrayals of the Vietnam conflict. He was born in 1946 in Austin , Minnesota and graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968. From 1969 to 1970, he served as an infantryman with the US Army in Vietnam . Afterwards he pursued graduate studies in Government at Harvard University. He worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post from 1973 to 1974.

Mr. O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, which received the National Book Award in fiction, and In The Lake of the Woods, which received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named best novel of the year by Time magazine. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary and popular magazines. His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, Tomcat in Love, and July, July.

Mr. O’Brien currently holds the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Southwest Texas State University.