Robert Olen Butler

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

Butler attended Northwestern University as a theater major (BS, 1967) and switched to playwriting at the University of Iowa (MA, 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.

From 1975 until 1985, he was the editor-in-chief of Fairchild's Energy User News (now Energy & Power Management).

Butler's first novel was The Alleys of Eden, which was published in 1981 by Horizon Press after being rejected by 21 publishers.

Its protagonist is an American deserter who decides to stay in Vietnam, as Butler's onetime writing professor Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times, "because, with all its troubles, Vietnam seems to him to retain more of its integrity, its sense of self, than the America he has left behind."

Before the publication of The Alleys of Eden, Butler had written, by his estimation, "five Ghastly novels, about forty dreadful short stories, and twelve truly awful full-length plays, all of which have never seen the light of day and never will."

Butler has always been a controversial artist, seemingly reinventing himself with each new novel or short story collection.

His shape-shifting often polarizes reviewers, as with his second novel, Sun Dogs (Horizon, 1983), which The New York Times said had "some powerful moments, some engrossing scenes and deft touches, but there is little momentum, no satisfying pattern, none of the magic of synergy."

Conversely, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram called the book "full of power and energy...mov[ing] from the most feverish of prose to a flatness and sparseness that is reminiscent of the best of Chandler and Hammett. And most importantly, he has something to say... Butler is an intelligent novelist who cares about his characters. He is skillful enough to make the reader feel the same way. It is not often that we get the chance to witness the birth of something this important."

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 had stories in 12 editions of The Best American Short Stories, New Stories From the South, and numerous college literature textbooks.

Butler has also written screenplays for film and television, most of them based on other writers' material.

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.

His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.

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.

"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."

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.

Robert Olen Butler is the author of 12 novels and six short story collections, including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In a review for the Guardian newspaper, renowned author Claire Messud wrote, "The book has attracted such acclaim not simply because it is beautifully and powerfully written, but because it convincingly pulls off an immense imaginative risk. . . . Butler has not entered the significant and ever-growing canon of Vietnam-related fiction (he has long been a member)—he has changed its composition forever."

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 novels was written on a legal pad, by hand, on my lap, on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan," Butler has said of his early writing.

Butler's short-story collections Tabloid Dreams (1996) and Had a Good Time (2004) take their inspiration from popular culture.

The stories in Tabloid Dreams were spun from the titles of outlandish articles in supermarket tabloids.

Had a Good Time builds its narratives around the images on vintage American picture postcards, which Butler has collected for more than a decade.

One example is the tale "Mother in the Trenches", first published in Harper's in February 2003.

It traces the journey of Mrs. Jack Gaines, a prosperous matron, from her comfortable home to the battlefields of World War I France, in order to convince her soldier son to come home; the story's basis is a period postcard that depicts a stout, middle-aged woman wearing dark clothes and a cloche hat.

Again the critical response varied dramatically.

The San Francisco Chronicle said that the stories "feel like a literary parlor game"; The Boston Globe called them full of "crisp writing, marvelous imagining, the discussion of large, existential questions that are as central to life now as they were a hundred years ago."

Severance, Butler's 2006 collection of 240-word short stories about the post-beheading thoughts of decapitated people (from Nicole Brown Simpson to Louis XVI to Butler himself) was the basis of Severance, a one-act play by David Jette.

It was produced in 2007 at McCadden Place Theatre in Los Angeles.

At the time, Butler described Severance as his best and most ambitious book.

This was the first of an extended venture into defining and exploring the short short story form.

His companion collection, Intercourse, comprising 100 very short stories, revealed the inner monologues of couples (often famous) engaged in sexual intercourse.

Weegee Stories, presenting the inner monologues of the subjects of 60 iconic photographs by Arthur "Weegee" Fellig, continued his interest in the form.

He also published a theory of the short short story in Narrative Magazine.

As further evidence of his predilection for self-reinvention, in 2009 Butler published Hell, a "roaring satire" of a novel set entirely in the underworld.

Donna Seaman of Booklist, the American Library Association's magazine, called his 2011 novel A Small Hotel a "sexy novel of psychological suspense", adding, "Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding."