Robert Olen Butler - Literary Career

Literary Career

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 French 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 Railroad 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 Railroad as I commuted back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan," Butler has said about his early writing.

The author'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 one-time 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." Prior to 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 was the case with Butler’s second novel Sun Dogs (Horizon, 1983), which The New York Times described as having "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 lauded the book as “full of power and energy…mov 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 included in a combined twelve 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. While the San Francisco Chronicle said that the stories "feel like a literary parlor game," the Boston Globe raved, that it was 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, his 2006 collection of 240-word short stories about the post-beheading thoughts of decapitated individuals (from Nicole Brown Simpson to Louis XVI to the author 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 of 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 he published Hell, a “roaring satire” of a novel set entirely in the underworld. His 2011 novel, A Small Hotel, is described by Donna Seaman of Booklist, the American Library Association’s magazine, as a “sexy novel of psychological suspense.” She goes on to say, “Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding.”

In still another act of reinvention, Butler publishes his first literary/historical/espionage/thriller, The Hot Country, with Otto Penzler's Mysterious Press in the fall of 2012.

In 2001, Butler wrote in real-time, a complete short story, “This is Earl Sandt,” from first inspiration to final story, in a webcast of 17 two-hour sessions. As the author explained of the broadcasts, "What we're trying to do here is reproduce for you what is normally hidden behind the veil of private life.". The webcasts, under its webcast title of “Inside Creative Writing,” have become a popular download on iTunes.

Butler taught creative writing at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, from 1985 to 2000. He then joined the faculty of Florida State University as a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor, holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing, where he currently teaches.