Alex Vernon, "Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien" (St. Martin's Press, 2025)

Jul 5, 2025

Alex Vernon, M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College and a Persian Gulf War veteran, dives deep into the life and work of Tim O'Brien, an iconic American novelist. He shares insights from his extensive research, including over one hundred interviews and previously unseen materials. Topics include O'Brien’s transformative experiences in Vietnam, the evolution of his literary voice, and unpublished anecdotes that reveal the intersection of personal history and major historical events. The conversation beautifully unpacks how these elements shaped O'Brien’s narrative style.

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ANECDOTE

Genesis of Writing the Biography

Alex Vernon met Tim O'Brien in 2003 and developed a trustful relationship over many years.
O'Brien personally asked Vernon in 2018 to write his biography, opening himself as a resource for the book.

INSIGHT

Historical Context Shapes Lives

People are products of their times, and historical context shapes personality and decisions.
Placing O'Brien's life within Cold War events gives readers a deeper understanding of his influences and era.

INSIGHT

Beyond the War Writer Label

Tim O'Brien resents being labeled solely a war writer because he values exploring the human condition.
His work spans war and non-war themes, focusing on character and moral conflict across all his texts.

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The first literary biography of Tim O'Brien, the preeminent American writer of the war in Vietnam and one of the best writers of his generation, drawing on never-before-seen materials and original interviews.

"Vietnam made me a writer." —Tim O'Brien

Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others—not to mention countless exchanges with Tim O'Brien himself—Peace is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien (St. Martin's Press, 2025) provides a nearly day-by-day, gripping account of O'Brien's thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam and gives equal diligence to reconstructing O'Brien's writing process.

This meticulously researched biography 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 It includes an unpublished short story about O'Brien from a college girlfriend, documentation of his comical involvement with the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, and a 1989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.

Peace is a Shy Thing is as much a history of the era as it is a story of O'Brien's life, from his small-town midwestern mid-century childhood, to winning the National Book Award and his status as literary elder statesman. A story which Vernon, a combat veteran of the Persian Gulf War and a literary scholar trained by officers and professors of the Vietnam era, is uniquely suited to tell.

Guest: Alex Vernon (he/him) graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (the only literature major in his class of over a thousand), served in combat as a tank platoon leader in the Persian Gulf War, and earned a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. The recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award and a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, he is the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas.

Host: Jenna Pittman (she/her), a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at Duke University. She studies modern European history, political economy, and Germany from 1945-1990.

Scholars@Duke: https://scholars.duke.edu/pers...

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/jennapittman

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