SOURCE: Butler, Robert Olen, and Michael Sartisky. “Robert Olen Butler: A Pulitzer Profile.” In The Future of Southern Letters, edited by Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe, pp. 155-69. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

In the following interview, originally conducted in spring 1994, Butler discusses his career, how winning the Pulitzer Prize has affected his life, and the importance of landscapes in his writing.

Robert Olen Butler was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his volume of short stories A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Born in 1945 in Granite City, Illinois, Mr. Butler served in Vietnam as a U.S. Army counterintelligence translator. That service and his subsequent residency in Louisiana where he serves on the faculty of McNeese State University at Lake Charles were the basis of stories about Vietnamese living in America. Prior to A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Mr. Butler published six novels that...