National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien will deliver an inaugural reading for the newly endowed James McConkey Reading Series, Friday, Oct. 22, at 8 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall. The series, which honors McConkey, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus, is free and open to the public.
"O'Brien is considered one of America's best fiction writers and is the only major American writer with a coherent body of work that addresses the American experience in Vietnam," said Michael Koch, editor of Epoch magazine, who helped organize the event.
Few authors have charted the complexities and moral ambiguities of war and life with more emotional candor and moral scrutiny than O'Brien. Yet O'Brien is much more than a storyteller, observers say; he's a teacher and philosopher as well as passionate observer whose gripping revelations, occasionally leavened with hard-bitten humor, inform the heart as they work the mind.
"The mere fact of having witnessed violence and death doesn't make a person a teacher," O'Brien said in an interview in the Chicago Review. "Teaching is one thing and telling stories is another. I wanted to use stories to alert readers to the complexity and ambiguity of a set of moral issues -- but without preaching a moral lesson."
A former national affairs reporter for The Washington Post, O'Brien has written eight books of fiction, numerous short stories and is a regular contributor to national magazines. In 1979, he won the National Book Award for Going After Cacciato, a brilliant and fantastical novel playing on the idea of dream and reality in war.
His first book, a memoir titled, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home, published in 1973, received mixed reviews. Undaunted, O'Brien continued to explore the Vietnam theme and in 1990, stunned critics and admirers alike with The Things They Carried, a masterpiece of interconnected stories that challenge and transcend traditional notions of fictional memoir.
O'Brien's views on the subject of writing memoir vs. fiction are noteworthy. In an interview for the "Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series," he said that, as a writer, he saw the question of lying vs. truth-telling as a semantic but "important game."
"One doesn't lie for the sake of lying; one does not invent merely for the sake of inventing," he said. "One does it for a particular purpose and that purpose is always to arrive at some kind of spiritual truth that one can't discover simply by recording the world-as-it-is. We're inventing and using imagination for sublime reasons -- to get at the essence of things, not merely the surface."
He will share his vision with Cornell English undergraduates as well as graduates in the creative writing program during his one-day visit.
The McConkey Reading Series is sponsored by the Cornell English department and Epoch, Cornell's literary journal. Koch coordinated the event, which is endowed by Cornell alumnus Fred Parkin '63.
Parkin previously helped support a small English program at Cornell that invited recent MFA graduates back to Cornell for readings. He also is helping to sponsor the Alpha Delta Phi Short Story Competition at Cornell, an undergraduate writing contest with a $1,000 prize.
For more information about the O'Brien reading, or the competition, contact Koch at the Epoch office, 255-3385.
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