Robert Olen Butler Robert Olen Butler, Jr., was born January 20, 1945 and raised in Granite City, Illinois, a steel town near St. Louis, Missouri . His father, Robert Olen Butler, Sr., was chair of the theater department at Saint Louis University and his mother, Lucille Hall Butler, executive secretary. Butler graduated from the University of Illinois with a BS in Oral Performance. He later studied at the University of Iowa and received his master's degree in playwriting in 1969. While in Iowa, he married and then divorced Carol Supplee. When Butler finished college, he enlisted in the army. He was assigned to military intelligence, received intensive Vietnamese language training, and was sent to Vietnam. Butler's "professional skills" were learned during a year-long immersion course, taught by a Vietnamese exile who also gave him insight into Vietnamese culture and the struggles of an exile. He served in Saigon until 1972. Many believe that his wartime training and experiences profoundly influenced his life, writings, and thinking. In July 1972, he married the poet Marilyn Geller and worked for a year as an editor and journalist in New York. When his wife became pregnant with their son, Joshua, the family returned to Illinois. Butler substitute taught in his hometown of Granite City in 1973 and 1974, then became a journalist in Chicago. He returned to the New York area in 1975 and accepted a position as editor of Energy User News, an investigative newspaper he created. According to Butler, every word of his first four published novels was written on a legal pad, by hand, on his lap, on the Long Island Railroad as he commuted between Sea Cliff and Manhattan. In 1985, Butler assumed an assistant professorship at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Louisiana is home to several Vietnamese communities, and Louisiana Vietnamese provided Butler with material for his Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Butler once said that he found that much fiction about Vietnam failed to depict the Vietnamese people in sufficient depth, perhaps because it focused more on military action. His early work is dominated by the "Vietnamese trilogy", novels in which a minor character in one appears as a major character in another..