Paco's Story

Larry Heinemann (1944-2019) was an American novelist best known for his Vietnam War novels Close Quarters (1977) and Paco's Story (1986), the latter winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1987 in a controversial upset over Toni Morrison's Beloved; he also wrote Cooler by the Lake (1992) and the memoir Black Virgin Mountain (2005). A Chicago native and Vietnam veteran with the 25th Infantry Division, he received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Fulbright Scholarship. Washington Post Obituary, National Book Foundation