Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Butler, Robert Olen - Robert Olen Butler and Michael Sartisky (interview date spring 1994)

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Robert Olen Butler and Michael Sartisky (interview date spring 1994)

SOURCE: Butler, Robert Olen, and Michael Sartisky. “Robert Olen Butler: A Pulitzer Profile.” In The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, pp. 155-69. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in spring 1994, Butler discusses his career, how winning the Pulitzer Prize has affected his life, and the importance of landscapes in his writing.]

Robert Olen Butler was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his volume of short stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Born in 1945 in Granite City, Illinois, Mr. Butler served in Vietnam as a U.S. Army counterintelligence translator. That service and his subsequent residency in Louisiana where he serves on the faculty of McNeese State University at Lake Charles were the basis of stories about Vietnamese living in America....

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Madison Smartt Bell (review date 23 February 1992)
   2. Richard Eder (review date 29 March 1992)
   3. Kathleen Gilgore (review date 4 September 1992)
   4. Cynthia McCown (review date 11 December 1993)
   5. Josephine Hart (review date 16 January 1994)
   6. Robert Olen Butler and Missouri Review (interview date February 1994)
   7. Julia Glass (review date 6 February 1994)
   8. Robert Olen Butler and Michael Sartisky (interview date spring 1994)
   9. Mark Ford (review date 12 May 1994)
   10. Helen Heritage August (review date August 1994)
   11. Lorrie Smith (essay date spring 1995)
   12. Jonathan Penner (review date 10 November 1996)
   13. Barbara C. Ewell (review date 17 May 1997)
   14. Susan Balée (review date summer 1997)
   15. Peter Stanford (review date 17 August 1997)
   16. Susie Linfield (review date 25 January 1998)
   17. Thomas Bonner (review date 20 June 1998)
   18. Ron Charles (review date 6 January 2000)
   19. Kit Reed (review date 16 January 2000)
   20. Jonathan Levi (review date 23 January 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

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