His fiction, especially in his early novels, reflects his experience during the height of the Vietnam war.Īfter returning to the United States in 1972, Butler served as a reporter and editor for the New York Times and then returned to teach at the high school in his home town for a short while. From 1969 to 1972, he served in Vietnam as an Army Intelligence officer and later as a translator for the U.S. He attended the University of Iowa for postgraduate work, receiving a master of arts in playwriting in 1969. The following year he married Carol Supplee, a marriage that was to last only four years. He graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 1967, with a degree in oral interpretation. His father was a college professor and his mother was an executive secretary. Robert Olen Butler was born in Granite City, Illinois, on January 20, 1945. Though the title " Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle" implies a farcical comedy, Butler is dead serious about this woman's plight,Įxamining her situation with the same measured care that readers expect of thoughtful works of literature. Excited about the signs of social progress in the modern world that she sees on the television in her hotel room, she is also worried about what this means for her future: with the cause settled to which she once devoted her life, she cannot imagine that there is any joy left for her, a stranger in a strange land. In her time (the first decade of the twentieth century), she was active in the feminist movement, wary of men and acutely conscious of the inequalities that marked the American society she knew firsthand.
She has no memory of the time that has passed from the sinking of the ship in 1912 to the time that a rescue helicopter arrived to save the lifeboat she floated in, sometime in the mid-1990s. This story consists of a monologue by a survivor of the Titanic disaster. Rather than simply sticking with the humor implied by the outlandish titles of the stories, however, Butler develops the humanity implied within each piece, exploring what the situations mean to the characters who find themselves in such bizarre circumstances. As the title of the book indicates, the basic premise of the stories in this collection is the lurid exaggerations found in the headlines of newspapers such as the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. " Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle" was published in Robert Olen Butler's 1996 short story collection Tabloid Dreams. Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle
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