His maternal grandfather was a career diplomat and his father a Peace Corps volunteer; for years his mother worked in international medical assistance.

[4] During the summer of 2004, while a student at Dartmouth College, where he played rugby and boxed, Klay attended Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia.

Instead, listen to their story and try to imagine being in it, no matter how hard or uncomfortable that feels.... [I]n the age of an all-volunteer military, it is far too easy for Americans to send soldiers on deployment after deployment without making a serious effort to imagine what that means.He has described how "the gap between public mythology and lived experience" even affects both veteran-civilian dialogue and the veteran self-perception:[10] [T]he mythologies are part of the experience of war.

Trying to have a conversation with someone (or even an honest conversation with yourself) about your war experience is an exercise in navigating through all the cultural garbage that's out there.The culture, according to Klay, presents hurdles to communication and a shared understanding:[5] One of the very strange things about coming home from the modern wars is you're coming home to a country where such a small percentage of the population is serving.

Veterans don't want to feel isolated, and in order to do that you need to find some way of getting your memories and relationships to those memories across to someone whose notions of what you've been doing are very vague and defined frequently by a variety of clichés.After Klay left active military service, he enrolled in Hunter College’s Creative Writing program, which was then under the directorship of his former professor, poet Tom Sleigh, whom Klay knew from the English department at Dartmouth.

[11] While completing his MFA at Hunter, Klay established important and vital artistic relationships with not only Sleigh, but also Peter Carey, Colum McCann, Claire Messud, Patrick McGrath, and Nathan Englander.

[11] When he was named a Hertog Fellow at Hunter, Klay was able to sharpen his research skills assisting novelist Richard Ford with his novel Canada (2012).

[17] His stories have appeared in collections as well, including The Best American Non-Required Reading 2012 (Mariner Books) and Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013).

[20] In July 2018, Klay was named 2018 winner of the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category Cultural & Historical Criticism.

[22] As of 2022[update], Klay was a faculty member in the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) creative writing program at Fairfield University.

But the voices are strong and varied, and we hear from enlisted men and officers, chaplains and lawyers, State Department do-gooders and college students, and, of course, many grunts.

If obscenity scrapes just the skin then through the narrative arc of tragedy and suffering Klay has managed to dig down to the organs.In the New York Times, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins wrote that "Klay succeeds brilliantly, capturing on an intimate scale the ways in which the war in Iraq evoked a unique array of emotion, predicament and heartbreak.... Iraq comes across not merely as a theater of war but as a laboratory for the human condition in extremis.

"[25] In November 2014, Klay won the National Book Award for fiction for his collection of short stories Redeployment.

Klay names Colum McCann (referred to above), and author of Let the Great World Spin, as his "mentor".