It was the end of summer on the Upper Peninsula. The leaves around the port city of Escanaba would turn soon and the waters of Lake Michigan would grow cold and choppy as winter rolled in. Tom Bissell was sitting at his dad's house, holding his head in his hands. Things were not going well. They were not going according to plan.

The year was 1996, and Bissell was just back from an abbreviated stint in the Peace Corps, working in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. After only eight months, after falling down a deep well of depression, after struggling to teach English, after watching his adopted puppy die in his arms on his twenty-third birthday, and after writing letters home in which he ominously referred to an imaginary friend named Blackmind, Bissell says, he came home early.

No one was very happy about this. Not him. Not his family. "Everyone told me I'd fucked up, that I wasn't tough enough, that I should have stuck it out," Bissell recalls. Back in Escanaba—a cold, tough, industrial town with long, Siberian winters—he realized he had to do something, even if it wasn't part of the plan. So he applied for a job at the local paper mill.

"They got three applications. I think they interviewed two people. I was one of them. I didn't get the job," Bissell says. "When I found out I didn't get the job, I thought, ‘I am so fucked!' I had no clue what I was going to do."

This wasn't how he'd pictured things when he'd finished college and sent off his applications to MFA programs—all of which had rejected him. This wasn't how he'd pictured things when he'd boarded the plane for central Asia. The future was suddenly very fuzzy. But it was about to come into focus.

After he'd come home from the Peace Corps, Bissell had sent an application to an internship program in New York City at Harper's Magazine, which he had been reading since high school. "I figured I had a cat's chance in hell of ever hearing from them," he says. But a few days after getting word that the paper mill had chosen a more suitable candidate, Bissell was sitting at home nursing a serious existential crisis when the phone rang. The answering machine picked up. "Hi," said the message, "this is Susan Burton from Harper's.…" Bissell ran to the phone. They wanted to interview him.

"I may have set the world record for driving from Michigan to New York," he says.

And so, as Tom Bissell raced east, things were becoming a little clearer. But there were still many things he didn't know. He didn't know that in a few years, he would end up working as an editor at Henry Holt. He didn't know that as a freelance writer, he would land bylines in the Believer, the Boston Review, Esquire, Harper's, and Men's Health. He didn't know that his work would appear in The Best American Travel Writing three times, The Best American Science Writing, and The Best American Short Stories, or that he would end up as a contributing editor at both Harper's and the Virginia Quarterly Review, or that he would win a Rome Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

And he had no way of knowing that by now he would be touring for his fourth book, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam, a memoir published this month by Pantheon Books that is a meditation on war and what it does to those fighting it—specifically Bissell's father, John, who served as a lieutenant and was injured in Vietnam before the author was even born.

It is just over a thousand miles from Escanaba to New York City, but for Tom Bissell, it was actually much farther than that. He'd wanted to be a writer since he was young, a notion he'd first gotten from two of his father's good friends: best-selling memoirist, fiction writer, and journalist Philip Caputo, who was in the Marines with John, and poet and fiction writer Jim Harrison, whom Caputo introduced to the Bissell family. "They would turn up every year at my house," says Bissell, "and were in my life at a pretty young age. I'm sure if it weren't for those two, I never would have gotten interested in writing to the degree that I did."

Bissell's parents divorced in 1977 when he was three years old, but his mother and father ending up living a few blocks away from each other. He and his brother, Johno, drifted between the two houses. Bissell remembers Caputo once showed up at his father's house in the early '80s, just after his novel The Horn of Africa (Holt, Rinehart, and Wilson, 1980) was published and had been optioned by actor Michael Douglas. "As I recall," says Bissell, "and he might dispute this, Phil turned up in Michigan that year in a Ferrari, or a Porsche, and he had a trunk full of hardcover copies of The Horn of Africa. It's a huge book and a great book. It's one of my favorite novels. And I remember handling it, and seeing this sports car, and Phil himself looked great, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this looks like a very cool way to make a living!'"

Caputo says he wishes it had been a Ferrari or a Porsche, but it was merely a Nissan 280ZX. Nonetheless, the impression he made on young Tom Bissell was lasting. So Bissell did what any hopeful writer will do: He read. John Updike's Rabbit, Run electrified him. John Gardner's Grendel inspired him. He was so smitten by Charles Baxter and Spalding Gray that he called them on the phone. "Gray was actually blown away that some kid in Michigan had read and liked his novel so much," Bissell says. Jonathan Franzen says that after he published his famous 1996 Harper's essay, "Perchance to Dream" (later retitled "Why Bother?"), he started getting letters from a kid in Michigan that were "a combination of fan letter, confessional, manifesto, argument, and pure exuberance."

Along with reading voraciously, Bissell started writing. In junior high he wrote poems about Lake Michigan. In high school he wrote a novella titled "Mall Zombies." Then, at seventeen, he wrote "Dandelions Grow in Heaven," a short story about a father explaining the death of the family dog to his two kids. Bissell gave the story to Caputo, a hardened war reporter who'd seen plenty of death in his time.

"I remember he knocked on my bedroom door," says Bissell, "and he came in and sat down and looked at me. And he said, ‘You know what? Keep it up. You should keep doing this.' That was the first time he ever encouraged me, and I remember that really vividly. I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I should keep doing this.'" Bissell kept doing it all the way through high school—which was about all he was doing besides smoking weed, dropping acid, and failing classes.

"I'm always startled that Tom came out of Escanaba," says Harrison from his home in Montana. "That's where he started out his desperately undistinguished academic career. He was a slow starter, but that's often true of writers."

"We were wondering," says Caputo, "if he was going to graduate high school for a while. We were even talking about him getting a GED or something."

Bissell may have had to do just that if it hadn't been for his high-school creative writing teacher, Doug Fix. "He was the only person at that time in my life who had good things to say to me," Bissell recalls. "I don't think he quite knew what hit him when I walked into his classroom, because after he encouraged me I was suddenly giving him fifty-page short stories. And he read them all. He read everything I gave him. And my becoming a writer—I think the only person happier with my becoming a writer than my mother or me was Doug."

After squeaking by at graduation, Bissell headed off to Bay de Noc Community College in Escanaba, where he met another great teacher. "Tom came into my poetry and fiction writing class and just tore up the pea patch," says Larry Leffel, who reports that Bissell was already dragging along two novels he'd written. "Not only were they novels—they were very promising novels. I could tell right away, here was that rare combination of immense talent with the drive, the discipline, and the devotion to carry on with it."

Leffel nudged Bissell toward the Bennington Summer Writing Workshop in Vermont, which he attended in the summers of 1993 and 1994. There he met fiction writer Bob Shacochis, who was an instructor. Shacochis still remembers the author as a very young man. "He had a mullet and a ponytail, black engineer boots and heavy-metal T-shirts," he says. "His jaw was always packed with chewing tobacco, and he was always spitting into a cup. He was a northern Michigan boy who had wandered into the wrong camp." Shacochis recalls that Bissell wrote "really weird heavy-metal science fiction," though Bissell insists he has never written any sci-fi, heavy metal or otherwise.

Bissell put in one year at Bay de Noc, and in 1993, moved down the road to Michigan State, where he started coediting the Red Cedar Review, the school's literary magazine, which was founded by one of his favorite writers, novelist Thomas McGuane. There Bissell published early work from then-emerging fiction writers like Lisa Fugard, the author of the novel Skinner's Drift (Scribner, 2006), Tom Paine (The Pearl of Kuwait, Harcourt, 2003), and Mark Jacobs (A Handful of Kings, Simon & Schuster, 2004). It was also at Michigan State where Bissell finished his third novel, which he asked his dad's friend Caputo to look at.

"I thought it was extraordinary," Caputo says, "and I told him so. Now my worry was that he would forge ahead with a career as a writer, knowing how difficult that is."

So he gave Bissell some guarded advice. "At the same time I encouraged him," Caputo says, "I discouraged him. I told him my own philosophy: Anyone who wants to become a writer will not become a writer. The only people who become writers are those who have to. You almost cannot do anything else. And if Tom were to discover that to be true, he should go ahead.

"And he did."

"I remember the day Iowa rejected me," says Bissell, who, near the end of his time at Michigan State, began sending out applications to MFA programs at Columbia, Michigan, and Iowa. "I was so confident that I was going to Iowa right out of college that it didn't occur to me that I might not get in. When I didn't get in, I actually called the school and was put through to Frank Conroy. I could tell he got a lot of these calls. He just said, ‘Look, I'm sorry, it's a crapshoot. Apply again next year.'" Bissell received rejections from all of his chosen schools.

But then one of his professors at Michigan State invited a woman who'd been in the Peace Corps to talk to Bissell's class. Bissell knew Shacochis had been a volunteer in the Caribbean, so he wrote to him asking if he should join. Shacochis sent back a postcard that simply said, "Yes." Not knowing what else to do, he signed up.

"I figured once I joined the Peace Corps," Bissell says, "I would have something to write about. And Holy God, did I get a lot to write about. I got so much that I only recently stopped writing about it." In 1996 Bissell went to Uzbekistan. He was stationed in the regional capital of Gulistan and determined to make the most of it. "If the sea for Melville was ‘my Harvard and my Yale,' I believed I could make Gulistan my Boston College and my University of Connecticut," Bissell wrote in his first book, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (Pantheon, 2003), in which he revisited the region.

But soon after arriving in the middle of Uzbekistan, Bissell started to feel more like Melville's castaway Pip than Melville himself. Beset first with gastrointestinal problems, then more serious mental ones, Bissell sank into a depression so black that he was almost sent home. He rallied, but then came another long downhill slide that would end with his having lost fifty pounds. One of the short stories he wrote at the time was about a boy who grew up in Michigan but for some reason went to Uzbekistan, where his character broke and was never the same again. After eight months, Bissell was on a plane heading back to Escanaba, where the paper mill rejected him and Harper's, finally, accepted him.

"That's when I really had to look at the guy closely," says Shacochis. "He had just been a tobacco-chewing, mullet-haired, heavy-metal geek from northern Michigan. But when he became an intern at Harper's, my God. You have to be one of the smartest people on earth to get that. In fact, you have to be smarter than the editors there!"

And so things slowly started to turn around for Bissell, who happily took up his chair in the intern room, where he helped compile the Harper's Index, sorted through the slush pile, typed up rejection letters, and did the grunt editorial work for four months, before heading off to work at W. W. Norton as an editorial assistant.

Within a few years of coming to New York, Bissell was hired as an editor at Henry Holt. He was still writing on the side, working on a collection of short stories as well as a novel (his fourth) about the Apostle John. No one wanted to publish either one. "That was extremely hard," Bissell says, "because by this time I was an editor, and I knew these other editors. Some of them were my friends—some very good friends—and no one wanted to buy my books."

Instead, Bissell's nonfiction, his journalistic work, is what garnered attention. He hadn't written much of it—just a bookish essay in the Boston Review about getting Paula Fox's work back in print—but he persisted. And when he heard that the actor Jeff Daniels was filming a movie about deer hunting in Escanaba, he called his old friend from the Harper's intern room, Donovan Hohn, who was now an assistant editor at the magazine, and told him he wanted to write an article about the filming of Escanaba in da Moonlight.

"I believed in his talents," Hohn says, "but he was untested as a writer of nonfiction." Hohn wrote a letter on Harper's letterhead that got Bissell access to the movie set, and Bissell headed home to the Upper Peninsula. When he was done, he turned in a long piece titled "Escanaba's Magic Hour," which Hohn brought to the next editorial meeting. Harper's editor Lewis Lapham looked it over, gave it the green light, and Tom Bissell's career as a nonfiction writer took off.

His career as a fiction writer, however, did not. Still, he kept making the rounds with his novels and stories. One editor at Pantheon liked his voice but couldn't buy anything. So she asked Bissell's agent, Heather Schroder, if he had any nonfiction ideas. At the time Bissell had pitched a story to Harper's about the death of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. His agent sent off his one-page query for the piece and the next day Pantheon made him an offer he couldn't believe and definitely couldn't refuse: $100,000.

So Bissell headed back to central Asia, where he researched his first book, Chasing the Sea. He revisited Uzbekistan, got harassed by the state police, spelled out the bloody and fascinating history of the region, and walked among the old rusting hulls that lay on the dried seabed of what was once a massive inland ocean.

Chasing the Sea is a hugely successful mix of travel, history, and memoir, all woven together into a compelling read. Putting the book together confirmed much of what Bissell believed about writing in different genres. "There's really no important difference for me between writing nonfiction and fiction," Bissell says, "other than that with fiction, I don't have a notebook I can look at. But I think the richness of telling a nonfiction story is comparable to that of fiction. And I think the opportunity you have to make real observations about the world in fiction is similar to that of nonfiction." Soon thereafter, Bissell proved that he was one of those few writers who can work well in both genres. After Chasing the Sea was published, he turned to his short stories with a fresh eye, and after more revision, God Lives in St. Petersburg was published by Pantheon in 2005.

God Lives in St. Petersburg is a series of tense, tightly drawn stories about people in foreign places who are usually out of their element in the same way Paul Bowles's Port Moresby, Graham Greene's Alden Pyle, and Hemingway's Francis Macomber were out of theirs. The book received even more acclaim than Chasing the Sea, and rightly so. The stories are spare and rich, elemental and mystical. And they reveal something essential about all of Bissell's work, Hohn says.

"There's a line in the lead story of God Lives in St. Petersburg, ‘Death Defier,' about the character, who is fictional but who resembles Tom in some important ways: ‘He had a quiet, appalled thought at all the things he did not know.' And I think that in all of Tom's writing, in his fiction and his nonfiction, the pieces bewilder his narrator and his characters, and they bewilder us," Hohn says. "You find yourself in a very foreign place. He tries to take us to that point of shock."

Readers of Bissell's new book will find themselves in another foreign place—Vietnam. Like Chasing the Sea, The Father of All Things began as an article. In 2003, Bissell was sitting down for dinner with Devin Friedman—an editor at GQ who wanted him to write for the magazine—wracking his brain for story ideas. (Maybe he wanted to go to Turkey? Why? He wasn't sure.) Then he started telling Friedman about his father and Vietnam, how it shaped him and affected his life, and how he thought of going back there.

That, Friedman said, is what he should write about. So, on assignment from the magazine, Bissell and his dad returned to Vietnam later that year, where the two of them traveled from place to place. They saw where his dad had landed in April 1965 and where he was wounded by a roadside bomb in Tuy Phuoc. Along the way, Bissell tried to make sense of the time and place that made his dad who he is. It was a long, moving piece of literary journalism.

GQ killed it.

"When they killed it," Bissell remembers, "I was in total despair about the piece. I thought I had totally whiffed. So I sent it to Harper's really sheepishly. I sent them the third draft. I'd gotten up to eight drafts with GQ, and it kept getting worse and worse. I just hated the whole process. It was awful. So I sent Harper's the third draft, which was the only draft that I really liked, and they said they'd run it as is."

"War Wounds" was published in the December 2004 issue of Harper's, and Bissell says it generated a bigger response than anything he's ever written. It was chosen for The Best American Travel Writing 2005 and became one of the few nonfiction pieces ever read on NPR's Selected Shorts. But he wasn't quite done with Vietnam.

At the time, Bissell was under contract with Pantheon to write a book about people who live in the Arctic Circle. He had a good title, "Cold Comforts," and not much else. He'd begun to dread the whole project.

"I was in Vietnam for maybe two days," Bissell says, "when I realized, this has got to be the next book. The minute I got home, I wrote [Pantheon] an e-mail saying I wanted to scrap the Arctic book and write a book about Vietnam."

So Bissell wrote The Father of All Things, which is as much a book about the Vietnam War as it is about Bissell's unanswered questions about who his father really is. When it was finished, he sent it around to the people whose work he loves, the ones who'd encouraged him along the way. Caputo said Bissell's "maturing talents are on full display." Norman Rush called it "a triumphant piece of work," and said that "the bravery of Bissell's engagement, his intelligence, and his uncanny eye for the conclusive detail are on rich display."

A starred review in Publishers Weekly stated that the "ambitious" book "confirms Bissell's status as a rising star of American literature."

Even though he hasn't run out to buy a Ferrari or a Porsche—or even a Nissan—and filled the trunk with copies, Tom Bissell's life has somehow come around to where he always hoped it would be: doing the work he loves, writing books (he has another two-book deal from Pantheon), and being admired by the people he admires. But even more than that—maybe even better than sports cars—is the fact that Bissell now finds himself giving back something he once received from the books he read growing up.

"They make you feel less alone," he says. "They connect you to people you don't know. I've gotten a couple letters like the one I sent Franzen. The first one I got, I almost started to cry. The guy said he'd never read a book that made him want to write more. And I knew exactly what he meant.Those books gave me the life that I have."

Frank Bures writes for Tin House, Wired, Mother Jones, and other magazines. His work appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). He is the books editor for World Hum, an online literary travel magazine.