📅 Monday, February 16, 2026
⏰ 6:00–7:30 PM
📍 The Brick House
From Prairie Village, Kansas, Alex Vernon brings a singular perspective to literary scholarship. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (where he was the only literature major in a class of more than a thousand) Vernon served in combat as a tank platoon leader during the Persian Gulf War before earning his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He is the recipient of an Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and currently serves as the M.E. & Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. This is his eleventh book.
Peace is a Shy Thing is the first literary biography of Tim O’Brien, the preeminent American writer of the Vietnam War and one of the most influential writers of his generation. Drawing on never-before-seen archival materials and more than one hundred interviews with family members, friends, peers, and Tim O’Brien himself, Vernon offers a nearly day-by-day account of O’Brien’s thirteen months as an infantryman in Vietnam, alongside a richly detailed reconstruction of his writing life.
The biography reveals new and surprising material, including an unpublished short story about O’Brien written by a college girlfriend, documentation of his unexpected role in the Washington Post’s Watergate coverage, and a remarkable 1989 attic exchange between American and Vietnamese writers on the eve of The Things They Carried’s publication—years before the two countries normalized relations.
Part literary biography, part cultural history, Peace is a Shy Thing traces O’Brien’s journey from a midwestern childhood to National Book Award winner and literary elder statesman. As both a combat veteran and a scholar trained by officers and professors of the Vietnam era, Vernon is uniquely positioned to tell this powerful story.
Registration is encouraged.
