Tom Perrotta

Thomas R. Perrotta (born August 13, 1961) is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels Election and Little Children (2004), both of which were made into 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 was adapted into the critically acclaimed TV series on HBO, co-created by Perrotta and Damon Lindelof.

Biography Tom Perrotta was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he spent his entire childhood, and was raised Roman Catholic. 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. where he was involved in the school's literary magazine, Pariah, for which he wrote several short stories. Perrotta earned a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1983,

Perrotta married writer Mary Granfield in 1991, and they have two children. , the couple lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

Career While teaching creative writing at Yale, 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 University. The unpublished manuscript of Election was optioned as a screenplay in 1996 by director Alexander Payne, which then led to interest in publishing it as a book. It arrived in bookstores in March 1998, followed shortly by its film adaptation, which was released in April 1999 to critical acclaim. and People called him "the rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps...and creating sidesplitting scenes". For his part, Perrotta describes himself as a writer in the "plain-language American tradition" of authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. The Wishbones (1997) Election (1998) Joe College (2000) Little Children (2004) The Abstinence Teacher (2007) The Leftovers (2011) Mrs. Fletcher (2017) Tracy Flick Can't Win (2022) Ghost Town (2026)

Short stories "The Weiner Man" (1988) "Wild Kingdom" (1988) "Forgiveness" (1989–1994) "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" (2004) "Kiddie Pool" (2006) "Me and Carlos" (2020)

Short story collections Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies (1994) Nine Inches (2013)

Essays "The Squeamish American" (2007)