Courtesy of TCU Press

It would be difficult to find a living American writer as decorated as Robert Olen Butler. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award. At 81, Butler is the author of 19 novels, six collections of short stories and a nonfiction work on the craft of writing. 

He won the Pulitzer in 1993 for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain. The award, he said, “gave me a free pass for the 33 years since then … to write whatever books came up out of my artistic unconscious.” 

In 2025, TCU Press released Butler’s 19th novel, Twice Around a Marriage, becoming the first university press to publish new fiction by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, believes Dan Williams, director of TCU Press. 

Williams, also an honors professor of humanities, has been an admirer of Butler’s work since reading A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain, short stories about the Vietnam War told from the perspective of Vietnamese refugees and exiles resettled in Louisiana and dealing with the scars of war and displacement. 

“That’s my generation, Vietnam,” Williams said. “I grew up with it, and so the book had a profound effect on me.” 

Trained by the Army as a translator, Butler spent a year in Saigon wandering the streets and alleys at night, speaking with locals. His experiences there and later with Vietnamese refugees inspired his collection. 

When bestselling Fort Worth author Jeff Guinn introduced Williams to Butler, Williams said, “It was like meeting a celebrity.” 

Lockdown in Paris 

Twice Around a Marriage had been turned down by major publishers, including Grove Atlantic and Knopf, so Williams was curious when it crossed his desk. “I looked at it, thinking, ‘I’m going to find out why all these big publishers have rejected it,’ ” he said. “I could find nothing. It was a wonderful story.” 

The book follows a couple in their 70s, Amanda and Howard, whose marriage, divorce and attempts at reconciliation are chronicled during a lockdown in Paris in 2020. The couple’s method: dueling autobiographical stories they write for each other. Uprooted in these tales are their pasts, their betrayals and their philosophies on writing and books. Amanda is a novelist; Howard a modernist literary scholar. 

Years ago, large commercial publishers would take a chance on literary writers like Butler, authors whose books earned critical acclaim but not blockbuster sales. Today, that calculus has shifted. 

The future of literary publishing will be small, independent, focused publishers and university presses like TCU Press, Butler said. 

Bigger publishing houses prefer to deal in established writers churning out homogenous books over a decades-long career, yielding a consistent profit, he said. Such criteria never mattered to a man who considers himself unfettered from genre, a writer focused on the work itself. 

“I’m four different writers,” Butler said. There’s the Vietnam War novelist, the writer of speculative fiction, the romance writer and occasional stints as a creator of espionage thrillers.

Nineteen novels in, Robert Olen Butler still writes from what he calls the compost of the imagination. Courtesy of Florida State University | Devin Bittner

Marriage is the thematic cover for Twice Around a Marriage’s other interest: the life and process of writing literary fiction. Butler is known for his conviction that literary writing rises from what he calls the compost of the imagination — the creative unconscious. A writer must write from the senses, he said, and put the thinking away. 

Amanda is the character whose sensibility most closely mirrors Butler’s own. In the opening pages, he writes of how she “slides now into a space in her brain like an athlete in the zone. … She lives in the sunlit village of her sense-driven imaginations, where the scholarly modes of abstracting, explicating thought are forbidden.” 

Love and Loss 

When Guinn was the books editor for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the ’90s, he met Butler at a local book tour stop, the beginning of a longtime friendship. Guinn has often said that Butler is the greatest living American writer. 

As friends, they discuss “the kind of consonants that are best to have in words when they kick off a sentence,” Guinn said, or conjure up characters out of passersby. In Twice Around a Marriage, Butler named a character Joanne Guinn, a nod to his pal in Texas. 

Guinn worked with Butler’s late wife, Clara Herrera, at the Star-Telegram. She completed more than 600 stories in Fort Worth and with the Austin American-Statesman. Guinn suggested that Herrera reach out to Butler, which led to a correspondence and ultimately marriage. Butler shared the book with her as he wrote it, marrying her in June 2022 before the final draft in October of the same year. Butler said she was “enormously helpful” in guiding the book to completion. 

The novel is dedicated to Herrera, who died in 2024. “She came into my life at a time when the book was stalled,” he said, “and having her love and support, I was able to re-engage with the book.” 

She was his lone audience member, he said, and he read the book to her three or four times during its creation. “Her wonderful, responsive, artistically sophisticated ear were part of my process in writing. I don’t only miss her personally. I miss her creatively.” 

“I can’t teach my students how to have courage, but I have to teach them they must have courage.”
Robert Olen Butler

Birds in Flight 

Amanda and Howard are the characters Butler “inhabits the inner voices” of while writing. At Florida State University, Butler teaches his fiction students to reckon with literary scholarship, not to collaborate with it. Howard represents the scholarly tradition his students must move beyond. Amanda coaches Howard on how to write like a novelist. In Butler’s own words, “one is an ornithologist. And one is a bird.” 

In an early encounter, the couple watch birds fly along the Seine. Howard says, “We know more about birds than they do about themselves.” 

“But what we know that the birds don’t is irrelevant to them. What they know that we don’t is how to fly. What that feels like … the closest we can ever get to that is for the literary artist to imagine the experience profoundly and to write of it directly, to our otherwise earthbound bodies. So that we might inhabit a bird through art.” 

Later in the book, Amanda attempts to persuade Howard to see writing this way: 

“I have to say you’ve surprised me so far. An ornithologist flapping his arms and actually lifting off the ground. But please don’t start scholarizing us now. You’ll end up naming the bones in your own arms and instantly falling to the ground.” 

“Intense Combinations of Things”

By publishing his work, TCU Press is maintaining Butler’s legacy for a new generation of readers. Olivia Discon, a recent college graduate, added an English minor after reading From Where You Dream, Butler’s treatise on tapping emotions, rather than intellect, when writing fiction. 

The story of two aging writers resonated with Discon. She said she admires how his theories on the craft of writing come alive in the couple’s interactions: “You see that the shift in the way that they communicate is really when they start talking from their senses or talking from the memories that shape them.” 

Twice Around a Marriage explores the questions haunting the literary craftsman: “Who am I?” and “What do I yearn for?” Butler said, the same questions dogging each person every day. Facing these questions is “the challenge for human beings. We are intense. There are 8 billion different identities on this planet, intense combinations of things.” 

Butler said he’s enjoying teaching writing more than ever, conducting one-on-one Zoom meetings to work with students. He hopes to help them learn to work “unflinchingly.”

“I can’t teach my students how to have courage,” he said, “but I have to teach them they must have courage.”

“Twice Around a Marriage” explores the questions that haunt the literary craftsman and, Butler says, dog each person every day. Courtesy of Florida State University | Devin Bittner

After Amanda completes one of her short stories, Butler writes: 

“After every story she’s ever written well, after every novel she’s finished and polished and published, there has been this same feeling. Something that was complex and oppressive and true that had been shaping itself unawares within her for a long time has now crowned and clambered and wailed its way out of her and bounded across the room and flung open the door and dashed out into the world.” 

What has bounded into the world is one of an American master’s most personal creations, and with it fiction readers’ hope that the university press model, and the artistic subconscious, can marry so that the genre persists.