Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O'Brien by Alex Vernon; 2025. Hardcover.

"Vietnam made me a writer." —Tim O'Brien

Featuring over one hundred interviews with family, friends, peers, and others—not to mention Tim O'Brien himself—Peace is a Shy Thing provides a nearly day-by-day, gripping account of O'Brien's thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam and gives equal diligence to reconstructing O'Brien's writing process.

Alex Vernon's research uncovered much about O'Brien's life and the journey that made him into a literary icon, including an unpublished short story about O'Brien from his college girlfriend, documentation of his comical involvement with the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, and a 1989 attic exchange between American and Vietnamese writers on the eve of the publication of O'Brien's most beloved book, The Things They Carried, years before the two countries normalized relations.

Peace is a Shy Thing is as much a history of the era as it is a story of O'Brien's life, from his small-town midwestern midcentury childhood, to winning the National Book Award and his status as literary elder statesman.