Robert Olen Butler

Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler with Sadie, one of three Bichon Frisees who share his antebellum plantation house outside of Tallahassee, FL

About The Author

Robert Olen Butler is considered one of the best short fiction writers working today and
was recognized as such with the 1993 Pultizer Prize for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of short stories about Vietanmese exiles living in the United States. Butler holds and MA from the University of Iowa (1969) and teaches creative writing at Florida State University, where he specializes in fiction and screenwriting. He is the author of 12 novels and six collections of short stories. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize he has received two National Magazine Awards for Fiction. A recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and has received two Pushcart Prizes. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They also have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by another short fiction master, Richard Ford. He holds a distinguished Frances Eppes Professorship at Florida State University. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited, with an introduction by Janet Burroway.Under the auspices of Florida Sate University, where he is a professor of writing, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in 17 two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series is a very popular download on iTunes under the title “Inside Creative Writing.” Since 1995 he has written feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of the film industry, none of these movies he was hired to write ever made it to the screen. Butler lives in Capps, FL, which has a population of one. Not surprisingly, he was recently elected Mayor of Capps. Bob is a recipient of the Faulkner Society's ALIHOT (A Legend in His Own Time) Award.

Major Work

A Small Hotel (Novel), 2011
Hell (Novel), 2009
Intercourse (Stories), 2008
Severance, Chronicle Books, 2006.
WeeGee Stories
From Where You Dream, Grove Press, 2005.
Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (stories), Grove/Atlantic, 2004.
Fair Warning (novel), Grove/Atlantic, New York, NY 2002.
Mr. Spaceman (novel), Grove/Atlantic, New York, NY, 2000. Excerpted in The Grove Press Reader, 1951-2001, Grove Press, 2001.
The Deep Green Sea (novel), Henry Holt & Co., 1998
Tabloid Dreams (stories), Henry Holt & Co., 1996.
They Whisper (novel), Henry Holt & Co., 1994.
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (stories), Henry Holt & Co., 1992.
The Deuce (novel), Simon & Schuster, 1989.
Wabash (novel), Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
On Distant Ground (novel), Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Countrymen of Bones (novel), Horizon Press, 1983.
Sun Dogs (novel), Horizon Press, 1982.
The Alleys of Eden (novel), Horizon Press, 1981.

A sleek, erotic, and suspenseful drama about men who cannot say the word love and the women they harm . . . Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding.
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

A Small Hotel is a gorgeous, hot-blade of a novel, infused with lyric grace—a page-turner that tracks the unexpected turns of a marriage. Reading it, I could not pull myself away. It is the story of a man and a woman—of love, betrayal and the cost of silence. Revelatory and precise, A Small Hotel is a gem of great literary fiction which contends that the life we live every day is not pedestrian, but charged, lucent. It can turn on a dime by what we say and what we fail to say.
—Dawn Tripp, author of Game of Secrets

Visions of the past arise in husband and wife on the brink of divorce, as metaphoric, coded conversations, minute gestures, and hurtful silences threaten grave consequences in this tightly focused, intensely imagined, masterfully omniscient novel. Robert Olen Butler understands the failings of men, and he understanding the failings of women just as well.
—Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue

This tiny, romantic novel could be read at a single sitting, but it’s best savored in small slices, accompanied by the quiet ticking of the heart. A marriage on the rocks, a race against time, the duel between past and present that exists in every living soul. As a woman, I particularly admired the portrayal of the husband, Michael, the type of silent man who is an enigma to women and a source of great pain in our relationships with him. Through Butler’s insightful rendering, Michael’s point of view came as a revelation.
—Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander

Intriguing . . . beautifully told.
—New York Journal of Books

A deliciously, unapologetically romantic novel...Butler's precise, emphatic writting flirts with melodrama but never feels hackneyed. In less skilled hands this story would be a guilty
pleasure. Instead, it's just a pleasure.
—O Magazine

I'll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.
—Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Honors

ALIHOT (A Legend In His Own Time) Award, Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society, 2006
National Magazine Award for Fiction, 2005
Paul Bowles Award for Fiction from Five Points, 2004
Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing from The Prairie Schooner, 2004
National Magazine Award for Fiction, 2001.
The Lotos Club Award of Merit (previously given to Mark Twain, Fiorello Laguardia.)1996.
National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, 1994.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993.
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 1993.
Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award, American Academy of Arts & Letters, 1993.
Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, 1993.McNeese State University Distinguished Teacher Award, 1993.
Honorary Doctorate from the State University of New York system