The Huntington Library is celebrating Octavia Butler with a special exhibition and conference. The exhibition follows her life & career in, roughly, chronological order. In 2008, after Butler died, The Huntington Library became the recipient of her papers, and 35 cartons of material, comprising more than 8,000 items. In the past two years, the Octavia E. Butler archive has been used nearly 1,300 times, making it one of the most actively researched archives at The Huntington. This new exhibition examines Butler's life and work. The exhibition runs through August 7th, 2017, and includes about 100 items that reveal her early years and influences. Additionally, it highlights some of the specific themes that repeatedly commanded her attention. The exhibition features samples of her earliest stories. On June 7th, curator Natalie Russell will lead a private tour of the exhibition.
Octavia Estelle Butler was born in Pasadena, California. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena Community College, and also attended California State University in Los Angeles, and the UCLA. During 1969 and 1970, she studied at the Screenwriter’s Guild Open Door Program and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, where she took a class with science fiction master, Harlan Ellison, which led to her selling her first science fiction stories.
Butler won the Hugo Award in 1984 for her short story, “Speech Sounds". In 1985, her novelette “Bloodchild” won a Hugo Award, a Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and an award for best novelette from Science Fiction Chronicle. In addition to her other books and awards, Butler was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1995 ever to win it.
On display in the exhibition will be one of the pages of motivational notes she frequently wrote to help herself stay focused on her goals. “I am a Bestselling Writer. I write Bestselling Books….Every day in every way I am researching and writing my award winning Best selling Books and short stories….Everyone of my books reaches and remains for two or more months at the top of the bestseller lists….So Be It! See To It!”
The exhibition will include examples of journal entries, photographs, and first editions of her books, including Kindred. Beyond race, Butler explored tensions between the sexes, and worked to develop strong female characters, a hallmark of her writing. She also challenged traditional gender identity. Bloodchild, for example, is a story about a pregnant man, and in Wild Seed, the plot develops around two shape-shifting—and sex-changing—characters. The exhibition will include notes Butler made about the two characters as she worked to develop them.
The Huntington Library is one of the largest, and most complete, research libraries in the U.S. in its fields of specialization. The Library’s collection of rare books, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps, and other materials in the fields of British and American history and literature totals more than nine million items. The Library collections date from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. The greatest concentration is in the English Renaissance, about 1500 to 1641; other strengths include medieval manuscripts, incunabula (books printed before 1501), maps, travel literature, British and American history and literature, the American Southwest, and the history of science, medicine and technology.
Additional information here:
http://www.huntington.org/octaviabutler/
http://octaviabutler.org/
