Nuclear Age (1985) was O'Brien's third novel and the farthest departure from his own experience. Set in 1995, O'Brien's protagonist, William Cowling, is a middle-aged man who grew up under the atomic umbrella, so to speak. He suffers severe paranoia over the possibility of nuclear war and finds solace in digging a hole in his backyard as an attempt to bury and quiet all the thoughts that antagonize him. Again, in this novel, O'Brien demonstrates his adeptness in creating a comic look at serious subjects, this being the real fear and threat of the Bomb.
After a two-year interim, O'Brien's short story, "The Things They Carried," the first vignette in the later novel of the same name, was first published in Esquire, and it received the 1987 National Magazine Award in Fiction. The short story was also selected for the 1987 Best American Short Stories volume and for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories of the 1980s. Additionally, O'Brien's short stories have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories (1976, 1978, 1982), Great Esquire Fiction, Best American Short Stories, (1977, 1987), The Pushcart Prize (Volumes II and X), and in many textbooks and Vietnam-related collections.
O'Brien published The Things They Carried in 1990, returning to the immediate setting of Vietnam during the war, which is present in his other novels. O'Brien's return to the rich raw materials of his own experience proved fruitful, as The Things They Carried won the 1990 Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction. The novel was selected by The New York Times as one of the year's ten best novels and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. In 1991, O'Brien was awarded the Melcher Award for The Things They Carried and won France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in 1992.
