Peace Is a Shy Thing : The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien

Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others--not to mention countless exchanges with Tim O'Brien himself this book provides a nearly day-by-day account of O'Brien's thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam and gives equal diligence to reconstructing O'Brien's writing process. It explores the life and journey that turned O'Brien into a literary icon and a household name. It includes an unpublished short story about O'Brien from a college girlfriend, documentation of his comical involvement with the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, and a 1989 attic exchange between American and Vietnamese writers on the eve of the publication of O'Brien's most beloved book, The Things They Carried, years before the two countries normalized relations