On the twentieth anniversary of its publication, The Things They Carried returns to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in paperback, with over two million copies in print. A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O�Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere�from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing�it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.