![]() He earned a bachelor's degree in government and politics. Paul, Minnesota, where he had enrolled in 1964. O'Brien was drafted for military service in 1968, two weeks after completing his undergraduate degree at Macalester College in St. Eventually, the national quiescence and contentment of the 1950s gave way to the political awareness and turbulence of the 1960s, and as the all-American baby boom generation reached the end of adolescence, they faced the reality of military engagement in Vietnam and a growing divisiveness over war at home. O'Brien's childhood is much like that of his characters - marked by an all-American kid-ness, summers spent on little league baseball teams and, later, on jobs and meeting girls. O'Brien's parents were reading enthusiasts, his father on the local library board and his mother a second grade teacher. ![]() And like his other main childhood interest, magic tricks, books were a form of bending reality and escaping it. Worthington had a large influence on O'Brien's imagination and early development as an author: O'Brien describes himself as an avid reader when he was a child. O'Brien's hometown is small-town, Midwestern America, a town that once billed itself as "the turkey capital of the world," exactly the sort of odd and telling detail that appears in O'Brien's work. The first of three children, O'Brien was born on October 1, 1946, at the beginning of the post-World War II baby boom era.His childhood was an American childhood. Like "O'Brien," Tim O'Brien, born William Timothy O'Brien, Jr., spent his early life first in Austin, Minnesota, and later in Worthington, Minnesota, a small, insulated community near the borders of Iowa and South Dakota. This distinction is key and central to understanding the novel. Readers should note and remember that although the actual and fictional O'Briens have some experiences in common, The Things They Carried is a work of fiction and not a non-fiction autobiography. O'Brien not only shares the same name as his protagonist but also a similar biographical background. The author Tim O'Brien is not unlike the character called "Tim" that he created for his novel, The Things They Carried, as both author and character carry the stories of similarly experienced lives.
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