Larry Heinemann: Veteran shocked the literary world with ‘Paco’s Story’

Larry Heinemann, a Vietnam veteran who drew on his war experiences in two well-received novels — one of which, “Paco’s Story,” startled the literary world when it won the National Book Award for fiction in 1987 — died Dec. 11 in Bryan, Texas. He was 75.

His daughter, Sarah Heinemann, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

“Paco’s Story,” published in 1986, was an unexpected winner not only because Heinemann was not well known — he had published only one previous novel — but also because of the daunting competition it beat out. Other nominees that year included “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison (which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a few months later), and “The Counterlife,” by Philip Roth (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction). It had been widely expected that one of them would win the National Book Award.

“When Mr. Heinemann’s name was announced,” an account of the awards ceremony in The New York Times said, “a brief silence gripped the ballroom, followed by uncertain applause.”

Among those surprised was Heinemann himself, who had traveled from Chicago for the awards ceremony at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan.

“I didn’t come here expecting to win,” he said after the announcement. “I came here for the party.”

The selection of “Paco’s Story,” about the war and its aftermath for the lone survivor of a battle, set off hand-wringing in the literary world.

A week after the award presentation, Michiko Kakutani, chief book critic of The Times, wrote an essay pointing out what she thought were the weaknesses of “Paco’s Story” and all but saying that “Beloved” should have won. Two months later (but before Morrison and “Beloved” had been awarded the Pulitzer), 48 black writers and critics published a statement deploring the fact that Morrison, an African American and by then one of the country’s leading writers, had never won a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize.

Some theorized that in picking Heinemann’s book, the three-judge panel was seeking to reaffirm the award’s reputation for recognizing out-of-the-mainstream talent. Certainly one of the remarkable things about Heinemann and his writing was that his was a voice not often found in refined literary circles.

“Larry Heinemann came from and wrote for and about the working class in this country — a class woefully underrepresented in our literary fiction,” Gerald Howard, an executive editor at Doubleday who edited and published “Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam,” Heinemann’s 2005 memoir, said by email. “Also the class that tends to have to fight our wars for us. He told the truth about that with unrivaled power and honesty.”

Larry Curtis Heinemann was born Jan. 18, 1944, in Chicago. His father, John, owned a small bus company, and his mother, Dorothy (Denton) Heinemann, was a homemaker who also owned a babysitting business.

Heinemann received an associate’s degree at Kendall College in Chicago in 1966, the year he was drafted into the Army. He was sent to Vietnam in 1967 as part of an infantry battalion.

“We were not pleasant people,” he wrote of himself and his fellow soldiers in a 1997 essay for the PBS website, “and the war was not a pleasant business. I have no doubt we radicalized more southern Vietnamese to Ho Chi Minh’s national revolution than we ‘saved.’ “

He served a year in Vietnam. After leaving the Army in 1968, he returned to Chicago and earned a bachelor’s degree at Columbia College Chicago in 1971.

“I was not one of those guys who got home and went to their room and shut up,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.