Robert Olen Butler has published ten novels: The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, and Fair Warning-and three volumes of short fiction-Tabloid Dreams, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, most recently, Had a Good Time, based on his collection of antique picture post cards (Grove Press, August 2004).
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. In 2001 he won a National Magazine Award in Fiction.
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 have also been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, seven annual editions of New Stories from the South, and numerous college literature textbooks.
Since 1995 he has written feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, and Universal Pictures and two teleplays for HBO. He is the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing and is driector of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. He is married to the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry.
In 1987 Robert Olen Butler was awarded the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award by the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran. Butler served in Vietnam in 1971 first as a counter- intelligence special agent for the Army and later as a translator.
