Tim O Brien Popular Books
Tim O Brien Biography & Facts
Conan Christopher O'Brien (born April 18, 1963) is an American television host, comedian, writer, and producer. He is best known for having hosted late-night talk shows for almost 28 years, beginning with Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993–2009) and The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien (2009–2010) on the NBC television network, and Conan (2010–2021) on the cable channel TBS. Before his hosting career, O'Brien was a writer for the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1988 to 1991, and the Fox animated sitcom The Simpsons from 1991 to 1993. He has also been host of the podcast series Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend since 2018 and starred in the 2024 travel show Conan O'Brien Must Go on Max. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, O'Brien was raised in an Irish Catholic family. He served as president of The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, and was a writer for the sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News. After writing for several comedy shows in Los Angeles, he joined the writing staff of Saturday Night Live. O'Brien was a writer and producer for The Simpsons for two seasons until he was selected by Lorne Michaels and NBC to take over David Letterman's position as host of Late Night in 1993. Despite unfavorable reviews and threats of cancellation in the show's first years, O'Brien and the show developed and became highly regarded, earning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. He hosted Late Night for 16 years, and as of 2023 is still the longest-serving host in the history of the franchise. In 2009, O'Brien moved from New York to Los Angeles to host his own incarnation of The Tonight Show for seven months until highly publicized network politics prompted a host change in 2010. After this departure, O'Brien hosted a 32-city live comedy tour titled The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, which was the subject of the documentary Conan O'Brien Can't Stop (2011). He then hosted Conan from 2010 to 2021. Throughout his career, he has also hosted a number of awards shows and television specials, including the Emmy Awards in 2002 and 2006 and the White House Correspondents' dinner in 1995 and 2013. Conan was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2010. Known for his spontaneous hosting style, which has been characterized by The New York Times as "awkward, self-deprecating humor", O'Brien's late-night programs combine the "lewd and wacky with more elegant, narrative-driven short films". His segments outside the studio, dubbed "remotes", have also become some of his best-received work, including the international travel series Conan Without Borders. With the retirement of David Letterman on May 20, 2015, O'Brien became the longest-working late-night talk show host active in the United States. This active streak ended with O'Brien's retirement from late-night television in June 2021, with his entire run as a late-night host lasting almost 28 years. Early life Conan Christopher O'Brien was born on April 18, 1963, in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, Thomas Francis O'Brien (b. 1929), is a physician and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School where he specializes in epidemiology. His mother, Ruth O'Brien (née Reardon; b. 1931), is a retired attorney and former partner at the Boston firm Ropes & Gray. O'Brien has three brothers and two sisters. O'Brien attended Brookline High School, where he served as the managing editor of the school newspaper, then called The Sagamore. He was a congressional intern for Congressmen Robert Drinan and Barney Frank, and in his senior year won the National Council of Teachers of English writing contest with his short story "To Bury the Living". After graduating as valedictorian in 1981, O'Brien entered Harvard University. He lived in Holworthy Hall during his first year with future businessman Luis Ubiñas and two other roommates, and in Mather House during his three upper-class years. He majored in History & Literature, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1985. O'Brien's senior thesis, entitled Literary Progeria in the Works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, concerned the use of children as symbols in the works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. During college, O'Brien briefly played drums in a band called the Bad Clams and was a writer for the Harvard Lampoon humor magazine. During his sophomore and junior years, he served as the Lampoon's president. At this time, O'Brien's future boss at NBC, Jeff Zucker, was serving as president of the school newspaper The Harvard Crimson. Career Saturday Night Live (1988–1991) After graduating from Harvard, O'Brien moved to Los Angeles to join the writing staff of HBO's sketch comedy series Not Necessarily the News. He was also a writer on the short-lived The Wilton North Report. He spent two years with that show and performed regularly with improvisational groups, including The Groundlings. In January 1988, Saturday Night Live (SNL) executive producer Lorne Michaels hired O'Brien as a writer. During his three years on SNL, he wrote such recurring sketches as "Mr. Short-Term memory" and "The Girl Watchers"; the latter was first performed by Tom Hanks and Jon Lovitz. While on a writers' strike from Saturday Night Live following the 1987–88 season, O'Brien put on an improvisational comedy revue in Chicago with fellow SNL writers Bob Odenkirk and Robert Smigel called Happy Happy Good Show. While living in Chicago, O'Brien briefly shared an apartment with Jeff Garlin near Wrigley Field. In 1989, O'Brien and his fellow SNL writers received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series. O'Brien, like many SNL writers, occasionally appeared as an extra in sketches; his most notable appearance was as a doorman in a sketch in which Tom Hanks was inducted into the SNL "Five-Timers Club" for hosting his fifth episode in 1990. O'Brien and Robert Smigel wrote the television pilot for Lookwell starring Adam West, which aired on NBC in 1991. Even with support from NBC president Brandon Tartikoff, the pilot never went to series. Despite the negative reviews, it became a cult hit. It was later screened at The Other Network, a festival of unaired TV pilots produced by Un-Cabaret; it featured an extended interview with O'Brien and was rerun in 2002 on the Trio network. In 1991, after the failure of his sitcom, O'Brien also had an engagement to be married fall through and he quit Saturday Night Live, citing burnout. "I told Lorne Michaels I couldn't come back to work and I just needed to do something else," O'Brien recalled. "I had no plan whatsoever. I was literally in this big transition phase in my life where I decided, I'll just walk around New York City, and an idea will come to me.": 160–161 O'Brien would later return to the show as host in 2001, and in a 2022 cameo appearance. The Simpsons (1991–1993) Mike Reiss and Al Jean, then showrunners of the a.... Discover the Tim O Brien popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Tim O Brien books.
Best Seller Tim O Brien Books of 2024
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An Englishman Aboard
Charles TimoneyFrom the author of Pardon My French and A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi, this is the charming and hilariously funny story of one man's attempt to travel the entire length of the Seine by...
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Soldiers Once and Still
Alex VernonAs the world enters a new century, as it embarks on new wars and sees new developments in the waging of war, reconsiderations of the last century’s legacy of warfare are necessary ...
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If I Die in a Combat Zone
Tim O'BrienA classic from the New York Times bestselling author of The Things They Carried "One of the best, most disturbing, and most powerful books about the shame that was / is Vietnam."Mi...
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They Marched Into Sunlight
David MaranissDavid Maraniss tells the epic story of Vietnam and the sixties through the events of a few gripping, passionate days of war and peace in October 1967.With meticulous and captivatin...
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Going After Cacciato
Tim O'BrienA CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIED"To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling MobyDick a novel about whales."So wro...
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The Court-Martial of Corporal Nutting
John R. Nutting & Roy M. FranklinJohn Nutting is nineteen years old in 1966. Raised in smalltown Idaho, to a family that could trace its military roots back to the Revolutionary War, Nutting knows he’s going to fi...
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Odysseus in America
Jonathan ShayIn this ambitious followup to Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay uses the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the pitfalls that trap many veterans on th...
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Tomcat in Love
Tim O'BrienA CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIEDIn this wildly funny, brilliantly inventive novel, Tim O'Brien has created the ultimate character for...
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Northern Lights
Tim O'BrienA CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THINGS THEY CARRIEDOriginally published in 1975, Tim O'Brien's debut novel demonstrates the emotional complexity and ent...
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Summary and Analysis of The Things They Carried
Worth BooksSo much to read, so little time? This brief overview of The Things They Carried tells you what you need to knowbefore or after you read Tim O’Brien’s book. Crafted and edited with ...
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How to Revise a True War Story
John K. Young“You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it,” Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried. Widely regarded as the most important novelist to come out of the Ame...
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We Pierce
Andrew HuebnerWe Pierce is the story of two brothers: one brother, Smith, goes to war. A true believer, he leads a tank company into battle in Iraq during the Gulf War. There he learns about the...
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The Nuclear Age
Tim O'BrienGoing After Cacciato (winner of the National Book Award in 1979) was widely acclaimed as one of the most powerful and emotionally vivid novels about Vietnam. Now, writing with the ...
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Four Years in the Cauldron
Brian O'DonovanSHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2021The riveting story of a nation at a crucial crossroadsFrom the start of his stint as RTÉ's Washington Correspondent Brian O'Donovan's live...
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Postmodern Counternarratives
Christopher DonovanThis book provides a wideranging discussion of realism, postmodernism, literary theory and popular fiction before focusing on the careers of four prominent novelists. Despite wildl...
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Volunteers
Jerad W. Alexander“Riveting and morally complex, Volunteers is not only an insider’s account of war. It takes you inside the increasingly closed culture that creates our warriors.” Elliot Acker...
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A Shout in the Ruins
Kevin PowersSet in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond, this novel by the awardwinning author of The Yellow Birds explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in Amer...
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The Odyssey of Echo Company
Doug StantonSELECTED BY MILITARY TIMES AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SELECTED BY THE SOCIETY OF MIDLAND AUTHORS’ AS THE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR The New York Times bestselling author of ...
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A Trauma Artist
Mark A. HeberleA Trauma Artist examines how O‛Brien’s works variously rewrite his own traumatization during the war in Vietnam as a neverending fiction that paradoxically “recovers” personal expe...
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The Age of Unpeace
Mark LeonardA FINANCIAL TIMES ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR'Compulsively readable... An essential course in geopolitical selfhelp' Adam Tooze'Full of fresh and often surprising ideas' Niall F...
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A Hard And Heavy Thing
Matthew J. HeftiTop 10 First Novels of 2016Booklist 2016 Great Group Reads Selection Contemplating suicide after nearly a decade at war, Levi sits down to write a note to his best friend Nick, exp...
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The Yellow Birds
Kevin PowersFinalist for the National Book Award, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive in Iraq. "The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begin...