The Things They Carried »

In collections of short stories and essays -- The Things They Carried and If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home -- and in his novels -- most notably, the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato -- Tim O'Brien has established himself as a startling and authoritative voice on one of the darkest chapters in American history -- the Vietnam war.

On the twentieth anniversary of its publication, The Things They Carried returns to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, with over two million copies in print.

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 meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. 

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.

Christopher Tuplin

This is a collection of stories about American soldiers in Vietnam by the author of Going After Cacciato. All of the stories "deal with a single platoon, one of whose members is a character named Tim O'Brien. Some stories are about [their] wartime experiences....Others are about a 43-year-old writer—again, the fictional character Tim O'Brien—remembering his platoon's experiences and writing war stories (and remembering writing stories) about them. —The New York Times Book Review

The Things They Carried Love Spin On the Rainy River Enemies Friends How to Tell a True War Story The Dentist Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong Stockings Church The Man I Killed Ambush Style Speaking of Courage Notes In the Field Good Form Field Trip The Ghost Soldiers Night Life The Lives of the Dead