[4] Robert Olen Butler is the author of 12 novels and six short story collections, including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In a review for the Guardian newspaper, renowned author Claire Messud wrote, "The book has attracted such acclaim not simply because it is beautifully and powerfully written, but because it convincingly pulls off an immense imaginative risk.

Butler has not entered the significant and ever-growing canon of Vietnam-related fiction (he has long been a member)—he has changed its composition forever.

"[5] Butler began writing novels on the Long Island Rail Road while working as a publicist for Fairchild Publications.

"Every word of my first four published novels was written on a legal pad, by hand, on my lap, on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan," Butler has said of his early writing.

"[7] Before the publication of The Alleys of Eden, Butler had written, by his estimation, "five ghastly novels, about forty dreadful short stories, and twelve truly awful full-length plays, all of which have never seen the light of day and never will.

His shape-shifting often polarizes reviewers, as with his second novel, Sun Dogs (Horizon, 1983), which The New York Times said had "some powerful moments, some engrossing scenes and deft touches, but there is little momentum, no satisfying pattern, none of the magic of synergy.

"[7] Conversely, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram called the book "full of power and energy...mov[ing] from the most feverish of prose to a flatness and sparseness that is reminiscent of the best of Chandler and Hammett.

The San Francisco Chronicle said that the stories "feel like a literary parlor game";[11] The Boston Globe called them full of "crisp writing, marvelous imagining, the discussion of large, existential questions that are as central to life now as they were a hundred years ago.

Donna Seaman of Booklist, the American Library Association's magazine, called his 2011 novel A Small Hotel a "sexy novel of psychological suspense", adding, "Butler executes a plot twist of profound proportions in this gorgeously controlled, unnerving, and beautifully revealing tale of the consequences of emotional withholding.

Butler taught creative writing from 1985 to 2000 at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with his colleague John Wood, to whom he dedicated A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

He then joined the faculty of Florida State University as a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor, holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing.

[22] On April 23, 1995, at Tavern on the Green restaurant in New York City, Butler married the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Dewberry.

[25] A controversy arose over the highly personal revelations in Butler's email, which was leaked by one of its recipients and subsequently reported on by major international media outlets, such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and National Public Radio.