Robert Olen Butler
1945-
Birthplace: Granite City, Illinois
Typewriter: Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve* (two-tone blue)

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, Fair Warning--and three volumes of short fiction--DreamsTabloid and 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 has 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.