Vietnam War writer Larry Heinemann has passed away

Larry Heinemann, who won the 1987 National Book Award for Paco’s Story, has died.

He died last Wednesday at age seventy-five, according to the Bryan-College Station (Texas) Eagle. 

Heinemann served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War, which served as the basis of much of his fiction and nonfiction.

Paco’s Story, which told the tale of a wounded Vietnam veteran’s postwar struggles, was a surprise winner for the National Book Award, defeating Toni Morrison’s Beloved as well as three other works.

He continued to write after the victory, publishing more fiction and a memoir about returning to Vietnam as a civilian, and was most recently working as a writer-in-residence at Texas A&M University.

You can read more about Heinemann in his obituary in the BCS Eagle.

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