Robert Olen Butler Robert Olen Butler, Jr., was born January 20, 1945, and grew up in Granite City, Illinois, a steel town near St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Robert Olen Butler, Sr., was chair of the theater department at St. Louis University, and his mother, Lucille Hall Butler, an executive secretary. Butler graduated from the University of Illinois with a B.S. in oral interpretation. He went on to the University of Iowa, receiving his M.A. in playwriting in 1969. While in Iowa, he married, and then divorced Carol Supplee. When Butler finished graduate school he enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to Military Intelligence, given intensive training in the Vietnamese language, and sent to Vietnam. Butler’s “professional proficiency” was gained in a year’s immersion course, taught by a Vietnamese exile who also gave him insight into the Vietnamese culture and the struggles of an exile. His tour of duty was served in Saigon until 1972. It is felt by many that his war time training and experiences deeply influenced his life, writing, and thinking. In July 1972, he married the poet Marilyn Geller and worked as an editor and reporter in New York City for a year. When his wife became pregnant with their son, Joshua, the family moved back to Illinois. Butler taught as a substitute in his hometown of Granite City in 1973 and 1974, then became a reporter in Chicago. He moved back to the New York City area in 1975 and took a job as editor-in-chief 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 back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan. In 1985, Butler assumed an assistant professorship at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Louisiana is home to several Vietnamese communities, and the Louisiana Vietnamese provided Butler with material for his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. Butler once said that he finds that much fiction about Vietnam fails to portray the Vietnamese people with sufficient depth, perhaps because it focuses more on the military action. His early work is dominated by the “Vietnam trilogy,” novels in which a minor character in one shows up as a major character in another.
Hennessy, Denis. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 218: American Short-Story Writers Since World War II, Second Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Patrick Meanor, State University of New York at Oneonta, and Gwen Crane, State University of New York at Oneonta. Gale Group, 1999. pp. 70-77.
Podolsky, Marjorie J. "Octavia E. Butler." Magill’S Survey Of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1-5. Literary Reference Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.
A BRIEF CONVERSATION WITH OCTAVIA E. BUTLER http://www.plcmc.lib.nc.us/novello/1999/listen/obutler.htm ESSAY ON OCTAVIA BUTLER http://www.towanda.com/sela/essay.htm Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response by Joan Slonczewski, presented at SFRA, Cleveland, June 30, 2000 http://www2.kenyon.edu/depts/biology/slonc/books/butler1.html Xenogeneis Patterns of Octavia Butler http://www.math.buffalo.edu/~sww/butler/butler_octavia0.html Voices from the Gaps Woman Writers of Color http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/OctaviaButler.html Octavia E Butler works and more. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/authors/Octavia_E_Butler.htm Online Literary Criticism Collection Octavia E. Butler http://ipl.sils.umich.edu/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?au=but-616
America's greatest and most influential authors developed their passion for writing due to cataclysmic events that affected their life immensely. The ardent author Richard Wright shared similar characteristics to the many prominent American authors, and in fact, attained the title of most well-known black author of America. Richard Wright created many important pieces of literature, that would impact America's belief of racial segregation, and further push the boundaries of his controversial beliefs and involvements in several communist clubs.
David Robinson is often regarded as one of the greatest centers to ever play the game of basketball. He was born on August 6, 1965 to Ambrose and Freda Robinson. As a student he excelled in all of his classes, and sports except basketball. By his senior year in high school he stood an incredible 6 feet, 7 inches tall, but had never played organized basketball. However, the basketball coach at his high school noticed Robinson and added him to the team without ever testing him. Robinson soon earned all-area and all-district honors, but not the attention of any college basketball coaches. But this did not matter to him, as basketball was not his first priority. Getting an education and becoming a student in the United States Naval Academy were his main concerns. After scoring a 1320 on the SAT, his goal of joining the Naval Academy was soon accomplished (Lewis, 16).
Bain, Robert, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., eds. Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.
Robert Johnson I went down to the crossroads fell down on my knees. Robert Johnson went to the crossroads and his life was never the same again. The purpose of this essay is to tell you about the life of Robert Johnson. He is the root of much of the music of today. If he didn't influence the musicians of today directly, he influenced the bands that influenced today's music.
the blues were a type of black folk song little known beyond the southern United
The town of Butler is not a very well known place, but I would not trade anything in the world for it. In this quaint little town one will find a wide variety of year round activities and traditional festivals. I have traveled to many places in our nation and to other nations, but I have yet to find a place that is as dear to me as my hometown. Most of the inhabitants of Butler will tell you the same thing, whether they have traveled or not. Butler has such a picturesque landscape that it is often the subject of many photographers. The history of this town is also one of the qualities that make it such a wonderful and unique place. The friendly people, various activities, such as water sports hiking, and the wonderful landscape in the town of Butler, TN, make it one of the premier vacation spots and home sites in the nation.
William Cullen Bryant was an American poet, born on November 3, 1794, in the rural town of Cummington, Massachusetts, to encouraging and supportive parents. He was widely recognized as child-prodigy, for the publication of his first poem in the Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts at the age of twelve(Byam and Levine, 491). It was no more than a year later that he wrote the long anti-Jefferson poem, The Embargo, that was printed as a pamphlet by his father. In the year 1810, Bryant was admitted into Williams College but stopped attending after his father could no longer afford the expenses. Despite this, Bryant continued to write poetry as he prepared for a legal career by working in a law office and was admitted into the bar in 1815. Unlike poets such as Poe, Emerson, and Whitman who poetic manifestos in celebration of their individual approaches to poetry, Bryant quietly published his works without making claims of its importance (Byam and Levine, 491).
In Douglas Monroy’s essay “The Creation and Re-creation of California Society,” the thesis is that studying history of California is not just about changes in state’s political concerns but is more about relation with human existence. First, he talks about land and liberty and how Californians settled at the landscape. Second, Douglas explains about the life in present day California. Last, he talks about Californios and Indios. Douglas Monroy’s purpose in writing this essay is to inform readers of how California and the inhabitants were in the 1800s by showing detailed life style.
Leroy Anderson was born June 29, 1908 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His parents, as children, immigrated to the United States from Sweden with their families. His father, Bror Anton Anderson, worked as a postal clerk in the Central Square post office. He also played the mandolin. Anna Margareta Anderson, his mother, was the organist at the Swedish church in Cambridge. He lived in the suburbs of Boston for twenty seven years with his parents and brother.
The Butler is a 2013 American historical drama film directed and produced by Lee Daniels and written by Danny Strong. Loosely based on the real life of Eugene Allen, the film stars Forest Whitaker as Cecil Gaines, an African-American who eyewitnesses notable political and social events of the 20th century during his 34-year tenure serving as a White House butler. In 1926, at the age of seven, Gaines is raised on a cotton plantation in Macon, Georgia, by his sharecropping parents.
Poet Gregory Orr once said, “the real task of a trauma victim–the task that makes life worth living again–is to reconnect the self to the world” (Orr, Gregory). In his piece, “Rebuilding a Life When Nothing Makes Sense,” Orr writes about his personal journey and experiences from a dark world to a light one, using poetry as a therapeutic tool. Orr focuses on the idea that despite facing extreme adversity, individuals can ultimately reconstruct their life paths, like he implemented. To support his argument, Orr uses tactics to organize the material, keep readers absorbed, and tell his unique life anecdotes. Gregory Orr’s “Rebuilding a Life When Nothing Makes Sense” is divided into three sections: “School,” “The Maidens of Hades,” and “The Thread
"And you don't even know who to trust anymore. Do you know who the bad guys are?" [...] "Of course you don't. Because you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys anymore. Nobody knows these days.