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, Rockefeller Hall, on the Cornell University campus. The series, which honors McConkey, Cornell's Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus, is free and open to the public. Few authors have charted the complexities and moral ambiguities of war and life with more emotional candor and moral scrutiny than O'Brien. He's known as 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.
Teaching is one thing and telling stories is another.
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 . In 1990, O'Brien stunned critics and admirers alike with The Things They Carried , a masterpiece of interconnected stories that challenge and transcend traditional notions of fictional memoir. The McConkey Reading Series is sponsored by the Cornell Department of English and Epoch , Cornell's literary journal.