Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Robert Olen Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, on January 20, 1945. His father was a college professor and his mother was an executive secretary. He graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1967, with a degree in oral interpretation. The following year he married Carol Supplee, a marriage that was to last only four years. He attended the University of Iowa for postgraduate work, receiving a master of arts in playwriting in 1969. From 1969 to 1972, he served in Vietnam as an Army Intelligence officer and later as a translator for the U.S. advisor to the mayor of Saigon. His fiction, especially in his early novels, reflects his experience during the height of the Vietnam war.

After returning to the United States in 1972, Butler served as a reporter and editor for the New York Times and then returned to teach at the high school in his home town for a short while. He married again in 1972, to the poet Marilyn Geller; they divorced in 1987. From 1975 to 1985 he was an editor-in-chief for the Energy User's News in New York City. Butler took a position as associate professor at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, moving into a full professorship in fiction writing in 1993. As of 2005, Butler was teaching at Florida State University; in the same year, he won the National Magazine Award for Fiction.

Butler's first novel, The Alleys of Eden, was published in 1981, after having been rejected by twenty-one publishers. When it was finally brought out, it was praised by critics and became a Pulitzer Prize contender. The next year, his second novel, Sun Dogs, was published. In all, he published six novels between 1981 and 1992. Butler's 1987 marriage to Maureen Dolan ended in 1995, when he married Elizabeth Dewberry. His short story collection in 1992, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1993 and was a nominee for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He published two more novels after that and, in 1996, another collection of stories, Tabloid Dreams, which includes "Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle." He also published another collection of stories based on a central concept: the stories in Had a Good Time are all based on antique postcards that Butler collected. In 2005, Butler wrote a how-to book: From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction.