The Things They Carried

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.