![]() ![]() Ellison became a mentor to Butler and encouraged her to attend the Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop. She loved learning and recalled, “You’re always realizing there is so much out there that you don’t know.” She also took a class with science fiction writer Harlan Ellison at the Screen Writers’ Guild Open Door Program. She took writing classes but also studied anthropology, psychology, physics, biology, and geology, among other subjects. She then continued taking classes, first at California State University in Los Angeles and then at the University of California at Los Angeles. That submission was the first of many and solidified her desire to-and her belief that she could-become a professional writer.īutler graduated from Pasadena City College with an Associate's Degree in 1968. She recalled in interviews that two things struck her after seeing it, “Somebody got paid for writing that story!," and "Geez, I can write a better story than that!"īutler began to find “companionship in words,” and she recalled that by the time she was ten she could be found carrying around a large notebook, writing down stories whenever she got a free moment. Whenever she wrote stories for school, they were so unusual that many of her teachers assumed she had copied them from published works. One teacher recognized her talents and encouraged the then 13-year-old Butler to submit one of her stories to a science fiction magazine for publication. She knew she wanted to write science fiction after seeing a 1954 B-Movie, Devil Girl from Mars, at age nine. From then on the library was my second home.” She had an endless appetite for stories and frequently made up her own while sitting on her grandmother’s porch. She immediately took me to the library and got me a card. She recalled her mother, “looked surprised and happy. Butler remembered accompanying her mother to work at wealthy homes in Pasadena and having to enter through the back door. Her mother, who only had three years of formal schooling, worked incredibly hard to make sure Butler had more opportunities and a better education than she had.īutler attended Pasadena public schools where, as a shy and frequently lonely student who struggled with dyslexia, she felt left behind. Her teachers interpreted her slower reading as an unwillingness to do the work rather than a sign of her struggles with dyslexia. When she was given books to read in school, she found them boring and unrelatable, and she begged her mother for a library card. Her father, who worked as a shoe shiner, died when she was seven and Butler was raised by her mother who worked as a maid and her grandmother. Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California in 1947. She grew up poor in a city that, while not segregated legally, was segregated in fact. Her books are now taught in schools and universities across the U.S. As one of the first African American and female science fiction writers, Butler wrote novels that concerned themes of injustice towards African Americans, global warming, women’s rights, and political disparity. Octavia E.Octavia Butler was a pioneering writer of science fiction. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There are no human societies without it, whether they acknowledge it as a religion or not. I would have spent more time struggling just to prove I was human than doing my work. ButlerĪs a black and as a woman, I didn’t think that I would really want to live in any of the eras before this, because I would inevitably be worse off. My race and sex had a great deal more to do with what people believed I could do than with what I actually could do. If they hadn’t had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish. Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. Information about the death of Octavia E. Her father died when she was a baby, and she was raised in Pasadena, California by her mother and grandmother. She is also known for her Patternist, Lilith’s Brood, and Parable series. The first American science fiction writer to receive the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, she published such popular titles as Kindred (1979) and Fledgling (2005). Find out the cause of death and more exciting information regarding the death of this famous novelist. Butler reached the not so modest age of 58 years. ![]()
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