Tom Perrotta

Thomas R. Perrotta (born August 13, 1961) is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated films. Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film version of Little Children with Todd Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is also known for his novel The Leftovers (2011), which has been adapted into a TV series on HBO. 2Biography Tom Perrotta was born in Garwood, New Jersey, where he spent his entire childhood, and was raised Roman Catholic in Garwood. His father was an Italian immigrant postal worker, whose parents emigrated from a village near Avellino, Campania, and his mother is an Albanian-Italian immigrant former secretary, who stayed home to raise him along with his older brother and younger sister. Perrotta enjoyed reading authors such as O. Henry, J. R. R. Tolkien, and John Irving, and decided early in his life that he wanted to be a writer. He was involved in his high school literary magazine, Pariah, for which he wrote several short stories. Perrotta earned a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1983, and then received an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Syracuse University. While at Syracuse, Perrotta was a pupil of Tobias Wolff, whom Perrotta later praised for his "comic writing and moral seriousness." Perrotta married writer Mary Granfield in 1991, and lives in the Boston suburb of Belmont, Massachusetts. 2Career While teaching Creative Writing at Yale, Perrotta completed three novels that he had trouble getting published. One was Election, the story of an intense high-school election inspired by the three-candidate 1992 United States presidential race, and another was Lucky Winners, which remains unpublished as of 2007 and which Perrotta described in 2004 as "a pretty good novel about a family that falls apart after winning the lottery." In 1994, Perrotta published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies which The Washington Post called "more powerful than any other coming-of-age novel." The same year, Perrotta left Yale and began teaching expository writing at Harvard Universit