Larry Heinemann

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This article is about the American novelist, not the composer/musician known for his collaborations with Blue Man Group.

Larry Heinemann (born 1944) is an American novelist native to Chicago. His body of work is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War. Heinemann served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968 with the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division. Heinemann's experiences there are documented in his most recent work, Black Virgin Mountain (2005), his only nonfiction piece. Black Virgin Mountain also chronicles his return trips to Vietnam and his political views concerning the country and the war.

While serving in Vietnam, Heinemann fought in a battle near the Cambodian border that filmmaker Oliver Stone also happened to fight in. Heinemann writes of the battle in his first novel, Close Quarters (1977), and in Black Virgin Mountain, and it also forms the basis for the climactic battle scene in Stone's Platoon.

Heinemann's fictional prose style is uncompromisingly harsh and honest. His second novel, his most critically acclaimed, is Paco's Story (1986), which won the 1987 National Book Award for Fiction, beating out Toni Morrison's Beloved in a decision that some thought controversial.^[1] Paco's Story relates the quasi-picaresque postwar experiences of its titular protagonist, who is haunted by the ghosts of his dead comrades from the war. These ghosts provide the novel's narrative voice.

Heinemann's third novel, Cooler by the Lake (1992), departed from the topic of Vietnam and was highly unsuccessful, both critically and commercially.