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Biography

Early life

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only child of Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshine man. Butler's father died when she was seven, so Octavia was raised by her mother and maternal grandmother in what she would later recall as a strict Baptist environment. While growing up in the racially-integrated community of Pasadena allowed Butler to experience cultural and ethnic diversity in the midst of segregation, she became acquainted with the workings of white supremacy when she accompanied her mother to her cleaning work and witnessed her entering white people's houses through back doors and being spoken to or about in disrespectful ways. Many times Butler's mother would bring home books and magazines the white families had discarded for her young daughter to read.

From an early age, an almost paralyzing shyness made it difficult for Butler to socialize with other children. Her awkwardness, paired with a slight dyslexia that made schoolwork a torment, made her believe she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless." Eventually, she grew up to be almost six feet tall, becoming an easy target for bullies. As a result, she frequently passed the time reading at the Pasadena Public Library and writing reams and reams of pages in her “big pink notebook.” Hooked at first on fairy tales and horse stories, she quickly became interested in science fiction magazines such as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Galaxy and began reading stories by Zenna Henderson, John Brunner, and Theodore Sturgeon.

At age ten, she begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter on which she “pecked [her] stories two fingered.” At twelve, watching the televised version of the film Devil Girl from Mars convinced her she could write a better story, so she drafted what would later become the basis for her Patternist novels. Happily ignorant of the obstacles that a black female writer could encounter, she became unsure of herself for the first time at the age of thirteen when her well-intentioned aunt Hazel conveyed the realities of segregation in five words: “Honey . . . Negroes can’t be writers.” Nevertheless, Butler persevered in her desire to publish a story, even asking her junior-high science teacher, Mr. Pfaff, to type the first manuscript she submitted to a science fiction magazine.

After graduating from John Muir High School in 1965, Butler worked during the day and attended Pasadena City College at night. As a freshman at PCC, she won a college-wide short story contest, her first fifteen dollars earned as a writer. She also got the “germ of the idea” for what would become her best-selling novel, Kindred, when a young African American classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As she explained in a later interviews, the young man’s remarks instigated her to respond with a story that would give historical context to that shameful subservience so that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival. Butler graduated from PCC with an associate of arts degree with a focus in History in 1968.

Rise to Success

Even though Butler’s mother wanted her to become a secretary with a steady income, she continued to work at a series of temporary jobs, preferably the kind of mindless work that would allow her to get up at two or three in the morning to write. Success, however, continued to elude her, as an absence of useful criticism led her to style her stories after the white-and-male-dominated science fiction she had grown up reading. She enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles, but then switched to taking writing courses through UCLA Extension. She finally caught her break during the Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor minority writers. Her writing impressed one of the Writers Guild teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, in Clarion, Pennsylvania. There, she met the writer and later longtime friend Samuel R. Delany. She also sold her two first stories: “Child Finder” to Ellison, for his anthology The Last Dangerous Visions, and “Crossover” to Robin Scott Wilson, the director of Clarion, who published it as part of the 1971 Clarion anthology.

For the next five years, Butler worked on the series of novels that would later become known as the Patternist series: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), and Survivor (1978). In 1978, she finally was able to stop working at temporary jobs and live on her writing. She took a break from the Patternist series to research and write Kindred (1979), but went back to finish it by writing Wild Seed (1980) and Clay’s Ark (1984).

Butler’s rise to prominence began in 1984 when “Speech Sounds” won the Hugo Award for Short Story and, a year later, “Bloodchild” won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. In the meantime, Butler traveled to the Amazon rain forest and the Andes to do research for what would become the Xenogenesis trilogy: Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989). During the 1990s, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998). In 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship, an award that came with a prize of $295,000.

In 1999, after the death of her mother, Butler moved to Lake Forest Park, Washington. The Parable of the Talents had won the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Science Novel and she had plans for four more Parable novels: Parable of the Trickster, Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. However, after several failed attempts to begin The Parable of the Trickster, she decided to stop work in the series. In later interviews, Butler explained that the research and writing of the Parable novels had overwhelmed and depressed her, so she had shifted to composing something “lightweight” and "fun" instead. This became her last book, the science-fiction vampire novel Fledgling (2005).

Death

During her last years, Butler struggled with writer’s block and depression partly caused by the side effects of her high blood pressure medication. She continued writing, and taught at Clarion’s Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop regularly. In 2005, she was inducted into Chicago State University’s International Black Writers Hall of Fame.

Butler died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006 at the age of 58. Contemporary news accounts were inconsistent as to the cause of her death, with some reporting that she suffered a fatal stroke, while others indicated that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her walkway. Another suggestion, backed by Locus magazine, is that a stroke caused the fall and hence the head injuries. After her death, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established by the Carl Brandon Society to support students of color to attend the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Clarion Writers' Workshop, descendants of the original Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop where Butler got her start thirty-five years before.