Robert Olen Butler

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Robert Olen Butler Biography

Robert Olen Butler is one author on whom critics can't seem to agree. While some have rapturously praised his work, others have found ample room for complaint. By Butler’s own admission, not everything he writes is a masterpiece. In one interview, he owned up to having a slew of his short stories, novels, and plays never published because they simply were not good. Despite the criticism, Butler’s 1993 A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, a collection of short stories based on the author’s experiences in Vietnam, won the Pulitzer Prize. In addition, Butler has won a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. An award bearing his name was created in his honor to recognize up-and-coming authors.

Facts and Trivia

  • Butler’s original interest was theater, which he studied as an undergraduate. Only while pursuing his Master’s degree did he switch to creative writing.
  • Butler served in the military during the Vietnam War and even did intelligence work. Some of his later books recount his fondness for the Vietnamese people.
  • The short story collection Severance, one of Butler’s most curious works, is about the post-beheading thoughts of people like Marie Antoinette and Nicole Brown Simpson.
  • Butler’s short stories have appeared in virtually every major publication, including Harper’s, GQ, and The New Yorker.
  • Butler courted controversy in 2007 when he sent his students at Florida State University an intimately detailed email about his fourth wife’s decision to leave him for billionaire Ted Turner.

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Biography

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Robert Olen Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, on January 20, 1945, the son of Robert Olen Butler, Sr., a theater professor at St. Louis University, and Lucille Hall Butler, an executive secretary. Granite City, a steel-mill town in the St. Louis area, attracted exiles from the Deep South and the Midwest, bringing to the area what Butler terms “a collision of cultures.” In the summers of his college years, Butler worked in the steel mills and found himself as comfortable talking baseball with the other workers as he was talking aesthetics with his father and his father’s academic colleagues.

Butler received a B.S. in Oral Interpretation from Northwestern University in 1967. On his twenty-first birthday, he decided to write the words rather than act them. To this end, he enrolled in the University of Iowa to pursue a master’s degree in playwriting. Immediately after receiving his M.A. in 1969, Butler enlisted in the U.S. Army, leading to service in the Vietnam War, an experience that deeply affected his life and his writing. Trained as a counterintelligence special agent and a Vietnamese linguist, Butler gained “professional proficiency” in the language after a full year of study. The immersion course was taught by a Vietnamese exile who gave Butler a glimpse into the Vietnamese culture and the struggle of an exile. Butler served his tour of duty in Saigon as administrative assistant to a U.S. Foreign Service officer who was adviser to the mayor of Saigon.

Butler’s early experiences with a wide variety of people while growing up in Granite City and his Army service during the war are the two elements in his life that most strongly influenced his writing. In Vietnam, Butler came into contact with a wider variety of Vietnamese people than most Army personnel did. The quality of his contact with the Vietnamese and their culture was enhanced by his command of the language. His total immersion in Vietnam, its people, and its culture shaped the worldview that would become apparent in Butler’s fiction.

Following his stint in the military, Butler worked as a substitute high school teacher for a year in his hometown. In 1975, he became editor in chief of the New York City-based Energy User News, an investigative newspaper he created. During this time, it occurred to him that he should be writing fiction, not plays. He enrolled in postgraduate work in advanced creative writing at the New School for Social Research in New York City, studying fiction writing with Anatole Broyard. Butler wrote short stories that were published in such magazines as Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Fame, and Genre. He eventually turned to the longer and more satisfying form of the novel.

During the daily train commute from his office in Manhattan to his home in Sea Cliff, New York, Butler wrote his first novel, The Alleys of Eden (1981), in longhand on a lapboard. Twenty publishing houses rejected the novel. One publishing house, Methuen, brought the book to the galley stage before canceling it. Publishers doubted the novel’s marketability, believing that no one would want to read the story of an Army deserter and a Vietnamese prostitute. The Alleys of Eden was finally published to critical acclaim by Horizon Press.

In 1985, Butler assumed an assistant professorship at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he became the sole teacher of fiction writing in the university’s master of fine arts in creative writing program. He settled in Lake Charles, a city with a community of Vietnamese exiles, with his second wife, Maureen, and his son from his...

(This entire section contains 737 words.)

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first marriage, Joshua Robert. Butler married again, to writer Elizabeth Dewberry.

Butler has received many awards for his fiction, most notably the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his 1992 collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Additionally, he was a charter recipient, along with only three other fiction writers, of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Since 2000, Butler has been Eppes Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University. In the fall of 2001, Butler wrote a short story, “This Is Earl Sandt,” from first conception to final draft in seventeen real-time Internet Webcasts to demonstrate the creative process. The story appears in the collection Had a Good Time (2004), and the entire event is archived at www.fsu.edu/butler.

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