Research Guide to American Literature

Butler read voraciously, despite being diagnosed with dyslexia. Extremely shy and
introspective, she began writing short stories at age ten, using her writing to stave
off loneliness. Butler graduated from Pasadena City College with an associate of
arts degree in 1968; she later attended California State University, Los Angeles,
and took creative-writing classes at UCLA. During the early years of her career,
Butler lived alone in Los Angeles, cared for her mother, and wrote and worked
at various jobs, including dishwasher and telemarketer. Later, while she regularly
gave lectures on various college campuses, contributed to National Public Radio
programs, and granted numerous interviews, she claimed to be “comfortably aso-
cial, a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles.”
A self-proclaimed “slow writer” with “limited literary talent,” Butler has said
that she had to “learn my craft.” In 1976 she published her first novel, Pattern-
master, part of a five-book series about telepaths connected to each other in a rigid
hierarchical structure; this foreshadowed Butler’s interest in hierarchies dictated
by race and class. In 1999, a few years after her mother’s death, Butler moved
to Seattle, where she continued to publish her work. Little else is known about
Butler’s personal life. Butler credits the portrayal of limited and often deficient
black characters in science fiction for her early inspiration: she remarked in a 2000
New York Times interview that there were only “occasional characters or characters
who were so feeble-witted that they couldn’t manage anything. I wrote myself in,
since I’m me and I’m here and I’m writing.”
A prodigious feminist writer, Butler is one of the first African American
women to secure membership in this male-dominated science-fiction club, as
well as the first to address race and gender and its impact on future generations
in a substantial way. Using science fiction as a medium for social commentary,
Butler authored fourteen books—of which Fledgling (2005) was her final—and
published several short stories in anthologies and magazines, for which she won
the most esteemed awards in the science-fiction world. “Speech Sounds” won
a Hugo Award for best short story of 1984, and “Bloodchild” won the 1984
Nebula Award and the 1985 Hugo for best novella. She also became the first
science-fiction writer to receive the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellow-
ship or “Genius Award” in 1995 following publication of Parable of the Sower
(1993), a novel about the perils of not paying attention to the world around
us—inevitable social, environmental, and economic decay. Butler’s books have
been translated into ten languages and offer powerful multicultural revisions of
history, with complex articulations of human nature and provocative visions of
the future.
As she does in many of her other works, Butler interrogates the relationship
among race, politics, and sexuality in Kindred (1979) not only by uncovering some
historical truths about American slavery but also by reflecting the binaries pre-
sented by race (and gender) in the 1960s and 1970s. She is among several black
writers, including Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Toni
Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Jewelle Gomez, Steven Barnes, Charles Johnson, Toni
Cade Bambara, and Maryse Condé, to use themes and experiences from the Afri-
can diaspora in fantasy or “speculative” fiction. Kindred was the first of Butler’s
novels to garner critical acclaim, leading to its republication in the Beacon Black

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