The Things They Carried

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking work of Vietnam War fiction and a meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. 
 
In this landmark collection of stories, The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.
 
Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.

The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

TIM O’BRIEN received the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato. The Things They Carried has sold more than seven million copies; it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was named a New York Times Book of the Century. In the Lake of the Woods won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. Awarded the Pritzker Literature Award for lifetime achievement in military writing, O’Brien has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.