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, brings a unique perspective as a former tank platoon leader and a literary scholar. He discusses Tim O'Brien's transformation from soldier to acclaimed author, emphasizing how his Vietnam experiences shaped his narrative style. The conversation explores O'Brien's intricate writing process and the complexities surrounding his legacy beyond war stories. Vernon also shares insights from numerous interviews and unseen materials, providing a compelling portrait of O'Brien's life and art.

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ANECDOTE

Vernon’s Unique Access to O'Brien

Alex Vernon met Tim O'Brien in 2003 and built a long-term relationship.
O'Brien personally asked Vernon to write his biography in 2018, opening access to private materials.

ANECDOTE

Gathering Rich Biographical Materials

Vernon used archives, interviews, and personal access to gather detailed materials.
People generously shared letters, videos, and personal stories, enriching the biography.

INSIGHT

Historical Context Shapes O'Brien

Tim O'Brien's life is deeply shaped by historical events like the Cold War and Vietnam War.
Placing personal moments alongside global history enriches understanding of his worldview and writings.

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 It includes an unpublished short story about O'Brien from a college girlfriend, documentation of his comical involvement with the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, and a 1989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