Dec 17, 2009

A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain | Author Biography

Robert Olen Butler was born January 20, 1945, in Granite City, Illinois, and spent the majority of his childhood in a small steel mill town in that state. His father, a retired actor, helped inspire his interest in books, movies, and theater, and his mother’s stories about Granite City during the Depression inspired the content for his fifth novel, Wabash.

Butler excelled in high school, serving as president of the student body and graduating as covaledictorian. He enrolled at Northwestern University, where he planned to major in theater. In his sophomore year, however,...