Robert Olen Butler

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Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer.

In 1993, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain was named Best Short Story Award for Fiction.

Early life

Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, to Robert Olen Butler Sr., an actor and theater professor who was named chairman of Saint Louis University's theater department, and his wife, former Lucille Frances Hall, as an executive secretary.

Butler began studying theater at Northwestern University as a major (BS, 1967), then moved to playwriting at the University of Iowa (MA, 1969).

Butler served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, first as a counter-intelligence service agent for the Army and later as a translator. He rose to the rank of sergeant in the Army Military Intelligence Corps. Butler's experiences during that time have inspired his writings, and as a result, he was awarded the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a veteran in 1987. Butler wrote "My best pleasure in life" in the morning, "I was able to wander out into the swelty back alleys of Saigon, where no one appeared to sleep, and then just walked the alleys and crouch in the doorways with the people," Butler wrote in The New York Times in 1993. "The Vietnamese were the most generous, most open, and welcoming people I've ever encountered, and they welcomed me into their homes and into their culture and into their lives."

Butler, who served in Vietnam as a steel mill labourer and a substitute teacher in high schools, joined Fairchild Publications, where he worked on the staff of trade journals such as Electronic News. He was the editor-in-chief of Fairchild's Energy User News from 1975 to 1985 (now Energy & Power Management).

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Literary career

Robert Olen Butler is the author of twelve books and six short story collections, including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. "The book has attracted such praise not because it is beautifully and ly written, but because it persuasively pulls off an enormous imaginative risk," renowned author Claire Messud wrote in a Guardian newspaper review. ... .. .. Butler hasn't entered the rich and burgeoning canon of Vietnam-related fiction (he has long been a member): he has forever changed the language of the book.

Butler began writing novels on the Long Island Rail Road while working as a publicist for Fairchild Publications. "Every word of my first four published books was written on a legal pad, on my lap, on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan," Butler writes.

Butler's first book, The Alleys of Eden, was released in 1981 by Horizon Press after being rejected by 21 publishers. "Since Vietnam's slums, the protagonist is an American deserter who chooses to remain in Vietnam," Butler's onetime writing professor Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times, "because, despite all the turmoil, Vietnam appears to have more of its beauty, its sense of self, and the America he has left behind." Butler had written "five ghastly novels, about forty gruesome short stories, and twelve tragic full-length plays, none of which had never seen the light of day and never will," Butler wrote before the book's release of The Alleys of Eden.

Butler has always been a controversial figure, with each new book or short story collection likely reinventing himself. Reviewers are often polarized by shapeshifting, as with his second book, Sun Dogs (Horizon, 1983), which The New York Times said had "some good scenes, some engrossing scenes, and deft touches, but there is no energy, no smooth curve, and no sense of synergy." The Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, on the other hand, described the book as "full of power and enthusiasm [moving] from the most feverish prose to a flatness and sparseness that is reminiscent of Chandler and Hammett's best. Butler, on the other hand, has something to say: Butler is an intelligent writer who cares about his characters. He is strong enough to make the reader feel the same way. We don't often have the opportunity to see something as significant as the birth of something.

Butler's stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Zoetrope: All-Story. He has appeared in 12 editions of The Best American Short Stories, New Stories From the South, and several college literature textbooks. Butler has written screenplays for film and television, the bulk of which were based on other writers' work.

Butler's short-story collections, Tabloid Dreams (1996) and Had a Good Time (2004) take inspiration from popular culture. The tales in Tabloid Dreams were derived from the titles of outlandish journals in supermarket tabloids. Had a Good Time weaves its stories around the images on vintage American picture postcards, which Butler has amassed for more than a decade. "Mother in the Trenches," was first published in Harper's in February 2003. Mrs. Jack Gaines, a wealthy matron, traces her migration from her comfortable home to World War I France in order to persuade her soldier son to return home; the story's origins is a period postcard that depicts a stout middle-aged woman wearing dark clothing and a cloche hat;

The critical reaction was again split. The San Francisco Chronicle said that the novels "feel like a literary parlor game," and that the Boston Globe called them "sp writing, magical imagination, and the exploration of big, existential issues that are as relevant to life as they were a hundred years ago."

Severance, Butler's 2006 collection of 240-word short stories about the decapitated people's post-beheading thoughts (from Nicole Brown Simpson to Louis XVI to Butler himself), was the premise of Severance, a one-act play by David Jette. It was performed at McCadden Place Theatre in Los Angeles in 2007. Butler's Severance was his best and most optimistic book at the time.

This was the first of a long line of defining and investigating the short story form. His companion collection, Intercourse, which included 100 short stories, exposed the inner monologues of couples (often popular) engaged in sexual intercourse. Weegee Stories, a collection of Arthur "Weegee" Fellig's inner monologues, piqued his interest in the style. In Narrative Magazine, he also developed a model of the short story.

In 2009, Butler published Hell, a "roaring satire" of a book set entirely in the underworld, providing further evidence of his predilection for self-reinvention. "Butler executes a plot twist of epic proportions in this beautifully planned, frightening, and succinct tale about the consequences of emotional withholding," Donna Seaman of Booklist, the American Library Association's book, called her 2011 book A Small Hotel a "sex novel of psychological suspense."

Butler's The Hot Country, Butler's first literary/historical/espionage/thriller, appeared in The Hot Country, his first literary/espionage/thriller, with Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press in the fall of 2012.

Butler wrote "This is Earl Sandt," from the first inspiration to the final story in a webcast of 17 two-hour sessions in 2001. "What we're trying to do here is to replicate for you what is usually hidden behind the veil of private life," he said of the broadcasts. On iTunes, the webcasts, tagged "Inside Creative Writing," have become a popular download.

Butler taught creative writing at McNee State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, from 1985 to 2000, with his mentor John Wood, to whom he dedicated A Good Scent from a Strange Peak. He joined the faculty of Florida State University as a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor, and he now holds the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing.

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