Through the 1980s and ’90s, her readership and reputation grew. More: Staying Apart, Together: A newsletter about how to cope with the coronavirus pandemic More: 10 must-read Black History Month book recommendations: Zora Neale Hurston, Kiley Reid and more Jemisin and others remember that the original cover for “Dawn” featured a white woman, making Jemisin all the more surprised when she read the book and realized the protagonist was black. Her first novel, “The Patternmaster,” came out in 1976, although it took her years to be able to support herself and for the industry to catch up to her.

Negroes can’t be writers.”Īt a writers workshop in the 1970s, Harlan Ellison read her work and became an early supporter, publishing one of her stories in a science fiction anthology. Her feelings of isolation led her to the reading, and writing, of science fiction and fantasy stories even as an aunt told her, “Honey. “I believed I was ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless,” she once explained. Born and raised in Pasadena, California, she was black, poor and stood 6-feet-tall. Grand Central Publishing is reissuing many of her novels this year and the Library of America welcomes her to the canon in 2021 with a volume of her fiction.īutler’s own life trained her to think in new ways. Toshi Reagon has adapted “Parable of the Sower” into an opera, and Viola Davis and Ava DuVernay are among those working on streaming series based on her work.

Her novels, including “Dawn,” “Kindred” and “Parable of the Sower,” sell more than 100,000 copies each year, according to her former literary and the manager of her estate, Merrillee Heifetz. “There was just this conspicuous absence where it seemed we all just vanished after a while.”Ī revolutionary voice in her lifetime, Butler has only become more popular and influential since her death 14 years ago, at age 58. “I remember just kind of being stunned that a black woman existed in the future, because science fiction had not done that before,” says Jemisin, whose “The City We Became” is currently a bestseller. It was the 1980s, and the book was called “Dawn,” the story of a black woman who awakens 250 years after a nuclear holocaust. Jemisin was a teenager the first time she read Octavia Butler, and nothing had prepared her for it.

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