Robert Olen Butler

182
Robert Olen Butler bigraphy, stories - Novelist, short story writer, professor

Robert Olen Butler : biography

January 20, 1945 –

Robert Olen Butler (born January 20, 1945) is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.

Early life

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

Butler attended Northwestern University as a theater major (B.S., 1967) and switched to playwriting at the University of Iowa (M.A., 1969).

Butler served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, first as a counter-intelligence special agent for the Army and later as a translator. He rose to the rank of sergeant in the Army Military Intelligence Corps. His experiences during that period have informed his writings, and as a result, in 1987 Butler received the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a veteran. "My greatest pleasure in life was at 2 in the morning to wander out into the steamy back alleys of Saigon, where nobody ever seemed to sleep, and just walk the alleys and crouch in the doorways with the people," Butler told The New York Times in 1993. "The Vietnamese were the warmest, most open and welcoming people I’ve ever met, and they just invited me into their homes and into their culture and into their lives."Peter Applebome, "An Author Catapulted Into the Foreground," The New York Times, 20 April 1993

After working as a steel mill laborer, a taxi driver, and a substitute teacher in high schools in the years following his tour of duty in Vietnam, Butler joined Fairchild Publications, where he worked on the staffs of trade publications such as Electronic News. From 1975 until 1985, he was the editor-in-chief of Fairchild’s Energy User News (now Energy & Power Management).It is now a publication of BNP Media.

Awards and honors

Butler is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2001 he won a National Magazine Award for "Fair Warning," a short story that was published in the journal Zoetrope: All-Story, and, four years later, he won another National Magazine Award for "The One in White," a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly.

In 1993, his first story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The New York Times praised the book’s "startling, dreamlike"

stories about the lives of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana, and said it was "remarkable not for its flaws, but for how beautifully it achieves its daring project of making the Vietnamese real."

The Pulitzer committee said that the stories "raise the literature of the Vietnam conflict to an original and highly personal new level."

Butler also is the judge of the annual Robert Olen Butler Prize, a short-fiction award founded and sponsored by Del Sol Press.

Marriages

On August 10, 1968, Butler married Carol Supplee. They divorced in January 1972.Who’s Who In America 2006

On July 1, 1972, Butler married poet Marylin Geller (now known professionally as Marylin Krepf).

On July 21, 1987, Butler married Maureen Donlan. They divorced in March 1995.

On April 23, 1995, at Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York City, Butler married the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry (born September 7, 1962).

The couple ended their marriage in July 2007 (The Washington Post reported that they were officially divorced on 19 July), according to e-mail Butler sent to his graduate students and fellow professors at Florida State University regarding Dewberry's decision to leave him for communications mogul Ted Turner. A controversy arose over the highly personal revelations contained within Butler's e-mail, which was leaked by one of its recipients and subsequently reported on by major international media outlets, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and National Public Radio.