Octavia Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, California. Butler spent most of her life in California. She had dyslexia, but she did not let that hinder her love of books. She was known for being a shy child.
While she decided to be a writer when she was ten years old, she didn’t begin seriously studying writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One of her mentors in the early days of her career was Harlan Ellison. Patternmaster, her first book, was published in 1976. Butler worked a variety of jobs to pay the bills while writing for several hours in the wee hours of the morning, similar to her character Dana in Kindred.
Butler broke through the glass ceiling of science fiction, a genre...
