Octavia E. Butler

Biography

Octavia Estelle Butler (1947-2006) grew up in Pasadena, California, the daughter of a shoeshine man who died when she was a child and a domestic worker who cleaned the houses of white families. She watched her mother enter through back doors and trained herself to endure the humiliation on her behalf. She began writing science fiction at age ten, sold her first story at age twenty-three, and spent years supporting herself with grueling factory and day-labor jobs while writing before dawn. She was the first science fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship. Kindred, published in 1979, grew from her impatience with the way young Black people she knew in the early 1970s expressed contempt for their enslaved ancestors' accommodation to the institution. She wrote the novel to answer the question: what would you actually do?

Octavia E. Butler at a glance