forever." Butler began writing novels on the Long Island Rail Road while working as a publicist for Fairchild Publications. "Every word of my first four published novels was written on a legal pad, by hand, on my lap, on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted back and forth from Sea Cliff to Manhattan," Butler has said of his early writing. Butler's first novel was The Alleys of Eden, which was published in 1981 by Horizon Press after being rejected by 21 publishers. Its protagonist is an American deserter who decides to stay in Vietnam, as Butler's onetime writing professor Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times, "because, with all its troubles, Vietnam seems to him to retain more of its integrity, its sense of self, than the America he has left behind." Before the publication of The Alleys of Eden, Butler had written, by his estimation, "five ghastly novels, about forty dreadful short stories, and twelve truly awful full-length plays, all of which have never seen the light of day and never will." Butler has always been a controversial artist, seemingly reinventing himself with each new novel or short story collection. His shape-shifting often polarizes reviewers, as with his second novel, Sun Dogs (Horizon, 1983), which The New York Times said had "some powerful moments, some engrossing scenes and deft touches, but there is little momentum, no satisfying pattern, none of the magic of synergy." Conversely, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram called the book "full of power and energy...mov[ing] from the most feverish of prose to a flatness and sparseness that is reminiscent of the best of Chandler and Hammett. And most importantly, he has something to say... Butler is an intelligent novelist who cares about his characters. He is skillful enough to make the reader feel the same way. It is not often that we get the chance to witness the birth of something this important." Butler's stories have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Zoetrope: All-Story. He has had stories in 12 editions of The Best American Short Stories, New Stories From the South, and numerous college literature textbooks. Butler has also written screenplays for film and television, most of them based on other writers' material. Butler's short-story collections Tabloid Dreams (1996) and Had a Good Time (2004) take their inspiration from popular culture. The stories in