Larry Heinemann

Heinemann grew up in Chicago and was drafted into the Army in 1966, serving a combat tour with a mechanized infantry unit in Vietnam that left him wounded and became the raw material for nearly everything he later wrote.

His debut novel, Close Quarters, drew directly on that tour, but Paco's Story (1987), narrated collectively by the ghosts of a wiped-out platoon watching their sole survivor drift through a hostile small town, pushed the material into something stranger and more devastating; it won the National Book Award in an upset over Toni Morrison's Beloved that provoked lasting controversy.

He taught fiction writing for years, including in prison writing programs, and received a MacArthur Fellowship. He died in Texas in 2019.