# The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk *A Biography of Octavia Butler* — Legendary Biographies No. 048 - **Subject:** Octavia Estelle Butler - **Written by:** Eleanor Whitlock - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 205 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 205 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-065-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Rowan Hale (ISBN 979-8-90623-210-6) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/048-the-lake-forest-park-sidewalk.html ## About this book She was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California, the only surviving child of a shoeshine man and a maid. She read voraciously, wrote her first stories at ten, attended Pasadena City College on a scholarship, took a Clarion Writers Workshop summer course in 1970, sold her first story to Galaxy Science Fiction in 1971, and over twelve novels and the Patternist, Xenogenesis, and Parable trilogies became the first African-American woman to win the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and the first science-fiction writer to win the MacArthur Fellowship. She died on February 24, 2006, at fifty-eight, of a fall outside her Lake Forest Park, Washington, home. Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier — in the Pasadena childhood and the shyness that lasted her whole life — and follows the arc through the Pasadena City College years, the Clarion summer, the Kindred (1979) novel that opened the door, the long Patternist series, the Xenogenesis trilogy that the 1980s science-fiction community could not at first absorb, the 1995 MacArthur, the Parable novels and the unfinished Parable of the Trickster, the move to Seattle in 1999, and the morning of February 24, 2006. What emerges is a portrait of an African-American science-fiction writer whose books the genre took thirty years to figure out how to read — and whose work the post-2016 American political situation has made the canonical literature of the moment. ## Contents 1. The Walkway 2. The Back Door 3. The Tall Girl 4. Devil Girl 5. The Open Door 6. Clarion 7. Patternmaster 8. Kindred 9. The Only One in the Room 10. Bloodchild 11. Dawn 12. The Xenogenesis 13. Parable of the Sower 14. Make America Great Again 15. The MacArthur 16. Fledgling 17. February 24 18. Earthseed ## Questions **Who is The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk about?** Octavia Estelle Butler. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,456 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 18 chapters, 205 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Eleanor Whitlock is a New York-based biographer who writes about American women of letters and their reckonings with celebrity. Her research focuses on the private spaces and public moments that shape literary history, as seen in her biographies of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, both of which were shortlisted for national biography prizes. Through titles like Black Holes, The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk, and The Biafra Broadcasts, she examines the intersection of archival history and personal narrative. Her other publications include The Jamaican Renaissance, The Fitzroy Road Kitchen, The Plaza Hotel Party, The Owl Farm, and The Elysee Hotel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends her spare time restoring vintage typewriters and walking in Prospect Park.