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March 30, 2004

Author Tim O'Brien To Speak At Augustana College

SIOUX FALLS - Award-winning author Tim O'Brien speaks at Augustana College on Wednesday, April 28. His presentation at 7:00 p.m. in the Elmen Center is free and open to the public.

The Things They Carried is the title of his presentation, and also the title of his book that received the National Magazine Award and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The work was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike.

O'Brien was born in Austin, Minn., October 1, 1946, but spent most of his youth in Worthington, Minn. He graduated summa cum laude from Macalester College in 1968.

He was against the war, but reported for service and was sent to Vietnam with what has been called the "unlucky" American division due to its involvement in the My Lai massacre in 1968, an event which figures prominently in his book, In the Lake of the Woods. The book was published in 1994 and received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named best novel of the year by Time magazine.

His other books are If I Die in a Combat Zone, Northern Lights, The Nuclear Age, Tomcat in Love, and July, July. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary and popular magazines including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic, and Ploughshares, and in several editions of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories.

After Vietnam he pursued graduate studies in government at Harvard. He worked as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post from 1973 to 1974. He currently holds the Roy F. and Joann Cole Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University.

O'Brien's appearance is supported by the Augustana Concert and Lecture Committee, the Augustana Mellon Foundation Fund, and the South Dakota Humanities Council.