Speaking Of Courage

Speaking of Courage by Tim O’Brien, a postwar story about Vietnam, was written in 1975 at the request of and based on Norman Bowker, an American solider who was having difficulties with finding a meaningful use for his life after the war. O’Brien originally intended for the story to be a chapter of Going After Cacciato so, instead of using Norman Bowker’s name, the protagonist in the earliest versions of Speaking of Courage is named Paul Berlin like the novel's main character.   The story has been revised and published in a number of places, appearing in various periodicals and anthologies with various textual variations. In 1990, a form of Speaking of Courage became one of twenty-two stories included in The Things They Carried, a sequence of interrelated stories that has been heralded as one of the finest volumes of fiction about the Vietnam War. In this version, the protagonist’s name is changed to Norman Bowker, after the story’s initial inspiration.

Speaking of Courage was first published as its own story in the Massachusetts Review during the summer of 1976. In 1980, Neville Publishing put out the first edition of Speaking of Courage in book form in 1980.