As of 1996 Butler's publications include eight novels, a prize-winning collection of short stories, and numerous contributions to respected journals and reviews. His defining themes are the suffering that results from thwarted desire and the intimacy that characterizes fundamental human relationships. His crafting of these topics in his collected stories about Vietnamese expatriates living in southwest Louisiana placed him at the forefront of American letters. A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992) earned the Pulitzer Prize, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Southern Review/LSU Prize for Short Fiction, a PEN/ Faulkner Award nomination, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Robert Olen Butler was born on 20 January 1945. An only child, he grew up, as did his parents, in the small steel-mill town of Granite City, Illinois, in the river bottoms across the Mississippi from Saint Louis and a few miles northwest...