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...