Tim O’Brien & Tobias Wolff Talk “Writing and War”

Last month, two award-winning writers and Vietnam veterans – Tim O’Brien and Tobias Wolff – met at Stanford University to talk about war and literature, a tradition that has given us Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. O’Brien has confronted war in two previous works, If I Die in a Combat Zone and Going After Cacciato. But he’s best known for The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories that gives literary expression to the Vietnam experience, and that’s now a staple of high school and college literature courses. As for Tobias Wolff, his memoir recounting his disillusioning experience as a soldier in Vietnam – In Pharaoh’s Army – was a National Book Award finalist, ranking up there with This Boy’s Life and Old School. Their wide-ranging conversation runs 80 minutes…