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 first novel was
The Alleys of Eden, which was published in 1981 by Horizon Press after being rejected by 21 publishers. 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'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. 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." The webcasts, under the title "Inside Creative Writing," have been available on iTunes. Butler taught creative writing from 1985 to 2000 at
McNeese State University in
Lake Charles, Louisiana, with his colleague
John Wood, to whom he dedicated
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. He then joined the faculty of
Florida State University as a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor, holding the
Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing. ==Awards and honors==