Selected Bibliography on Tim O'Brien

Books

If I Die in a Combat Zone. New York: Delacorte, 1973.

Northern Lights. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1975.

Going After Cacciato. New York: Delacorte/Seymour Lawrence, 1978.

The Nuclear Age. New York: Knopf, 1985.

The Things They Carried. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1990.

In the Lake of the Woods. Boston: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1994.

Tomcat in Love. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

Short Fiction

Note: Much of O'Brien's short fiction has been revised and included in his books. I have not listed most of those short pieces.

"Speaking of Courage." Massachusetts Review 17, no. 2: 243-253 (Summer 1976). Significantly revised in The Things They Carried and discussed in the chapter titled "Notes."

"Loon Point." Esquire, January 1993, pp. 90-94.

"Class of '68." Esquire, March 1998, p. 160.

"The Streak." New Yorker, September 28, 1998, pp. 88-91.

Journalism and other short works

"Darkness on the Edge of Town." Feature, January 1979, pp. 42-49.

"The Violent Vet." Esquire, December 1979, pp. 96-104.

"We've Adjusted Too Well." In The Wounded Generation: America After Vietnam. Edited by A.D. Horne. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981. Pp. 205-207.

"The Vietnam in Me." New York Times Magazine, Oct 2, 1994, pp. 48-57.

Bibliographies

Calloway, Catherine. "Tim O'Brien (1946- ): A Primary and Secondary Bibliography." Bulletin of Bibliography 50, no. 3: 223-229 (September 1993).

Critical and Biographical Studies

Bates, Milton. "Tim O'Brien's Myth of Courage." Modern Fiction Studies 33, no. 2: 263-279 (Summer 1987).

---. "Toward a Politico-Poetics of The War Story." In his The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. 214-269.

Beidler, Philip D. "The Life of Fiction." In his Re-Writing America: Vietnam Authors in Their Generation. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Pp. 9-103.

Bonn, Maria S. "Can Stories Save Us? Tim O'Brien and The Efficacy of The Text." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 1: 2-15 (Fall 1994).

Calloway, Catherine. "How to tell a true war story:" Metafiction in The Things They Carried. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 4: 249-257 (Summer 1995).

Couser, G. Thomas. "Going After Cacciato: The Romance and the Real War." Journal of Narrative Technique 13, no. 1: 1-10 (Winter 1983).

Herzog, Tobey C. "Consideration." In his Vietnam War Stories: Innocence Lost. London: Routledge, 1992. Pp. 139-166.

---. Tim O'Brien. New York: Twayne, 1997. Includes a bibliography.

Jarraway, David R. "'Excremental Assualt' in Tim O'Brien: Trauma and Recovery in Vietnam War Literature.." Modern Fiction Studies 44, no. 3: 695-711 (Fall 1998).

Jones, Dale W. "The Vietnams of Michael Herr and Tim O'Brien: Tales of Disintegration and Integration." Canadian Review of American Studies 13, no. 3: 309-320 (Winter 1982).

Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995.

Kinney, Katherine. "American Exceptionalism and Empire in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato." American Literary History 7, no. 4: 633-53 (Winter 1995).

Myers, Thomas. Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Nelson, Marie. "Two Consciences: A Reading of Tim O"Brien's Vietnam Trilogy: If I Die in a Combat Zone, Going After Cacciato, and Northern Lights" In Third Force Pyschology and the Study of Literature. Edited by B. J. Paris. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986. Pp. 262-279.

Ringnalda, Don. "Tim O'Brien's Understood Confusion." In his Fighting and Writing the Vietnam War. Jackon, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Pp. 90-114.

Schroeder, Eric James. "The Past and The Possible: Tim O'Brien's Dialectic of Meaning and Imagination." In Search and Clear: Critical Responses to Selected Literature and Films of the Vietnam War. Edited by W.J. Searle. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988. Pp. 116-134.

Taylor, Mark. "Tim O'Brien's War." Centennial Review 34, no. 2: 213-230 (Spring 1995).

Schwininger, Lee. "Ecofeminism, Nuclearism, and O'Brien's The Nuclear Age." In The Nightmare Considered: Critical Essays on Nuclear War Literature. Edited by N. Anisfield. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Pp. 177-185.

Tegmark, Mats. In the Shoes of a Soldier: Communication in Tim O'Brien's Vietnam Narratives. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala,1998.

Zins, Daniel L. "Imagining the Real: The Fiction of Tim O'Brien." The Hollins Critic 23, no. 3: 1-12.

Interviews

Bruckner, D.J.R. "A Storyteller For the War That Won't End." New York Times, April 3, 1990: C15+.

Caldwell, Gail. "Staying True to Vietnam." Boston Globe, March 29, 1990: 69+.

Coffey, Michael. "Tim O'Brien." Publisher's Weekly, Februrary 16, 1990: 60-61.

Kaplan, Steven. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." Missouri Review 14, no. 3: 95-108 (1991).

Lyons, Gene. "No More Bugles, No More Drums." Entertainment Weekly, February 23, 1990: 50-52.

McCaffery, Larry. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." In Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Edited by T. LeClair. Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Pp. 262-278.

McNerney, Brian C. "Responsibly Inventing History: An Interview with Tim O'Brien." War, Literature, and the Arts 6: 1-26 (Fall/Winter 1994).

Naparsteck, Martin. "An Interview with Tim O'Brien." Contemporary Literature 32, no. 1: 1-11 (Spring 1991).

Schroeder, Eric James. "Two Interviews: Talks with Tim O'Brien and Robert Stone." Modern Fiction Studies 30, no. 1: 135-164 (Spring 1994).

Schumacher, Michael. "Writing Stories From Life." Writer's Digest 71: 34-39 (April 1991).

Weber, Bruce. "Wrestling with War and Love; Raw Pain, Relived Tim O'Brien's Way." New York Times, September 2, 1998: E1.

Films and other performances based on the works of Tim O'Brien

In the Lake of the Woods. Screenplay by Philip Rosenberg. Directed by Carl Schenkel. Signboard Hill Productions, 1996.

Compiled by Dana Cairns Watson