Robert Olen Butler is an American fiction writer. His short-story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993. Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, to Robert Olen Butler Sr., an actor and theater professor who became the chairman of the theater department of Saint Louis University, and his wife, the former Lucille Frances Hall, an executive secretary. Butler attended Northwestern University as a theater major and switched to playwriting at the University of Iowa . Butler served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971, first as a... counter-intelligence special agent for the Army and later as a translator. He rose to the rank of sergeant in the Army Military Intelligence Corps. His experiences during that period have informed his writings, and as a result, in 1987 Butler received the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans of America for outstanding contributions to American culture by a veteran.
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