Tom Perrotta
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Thomas R. Perrotta (born 13 August 1961 in Garwood, New Jersey, USA) is an Academy Award-nominated American novelist and former English professor. He has penned such novels as Election and the recent Little Children. As of 2005, Little Children has been made into a Golden Globes nominated film for best picture starring Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly and Patrick Wilson. It was co-written & directed by Todd Field.
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[edit] Biography
Perrotta developed his eye for the world amidst the songs of Bruce Springsteen and beneath the glow of dark American movies -- The Graduate, Chinatown, Taxi Driver -- that graced the Sixties and Seventies.[citation needed] He earned a B.A. in English from Yale University and then received an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Syracuse University. He has taught at Yale and Harvard University [1].
In 1994, Tom published his first book, Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, a collection of short stories that The Washington Post called "more powerful than any other coming-of-age novel." On the heels of Bad Haircut came two more novels focused on the clash of adolescence and adulthood: The Wishbones and Election, both published to much acclaim, though it was the latter that would prove to be his breakout success. A high school election gone awry, a teacher-student affair, teenagers on the verge of adulthood -- Election was a captivating satire that was optioned for a film three years before it was published as a novel -- arriving in the bookstores in 1999, a few months before the movie came out (see Election).[2] The film turned into a popular New Line Cinema movie starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
Following Election, Perrotta continued to write about the humor and delight in everyday social interactions, only he shifted his focus to an older -- though just as troubled -- cast of characters: first with Joe College, a comic journey into the dark side of higher education, love, and food service; and then most recently with Little Children, his most ambitious novel that explores the psychological depths beneath the surface of suburbia.[citation needed] Little Children has been chosen for numerous "Best Books of 2004" lists -- including The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, National Public Radio, and People magazine -- and has garnered tremendous praise from all fronts, calling Tom "an American Chekhov" (New York Times) [3] and a "rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps . . . and creating sidesplitting scenes" (People).[citation needed]
Currently, Tom lives with his wife and two children (a son and a daughter) in Belmont, Massachusetts, and has been working on a screenplay with ex-Frasier writer, Rob Greenberg.[citation needed] He is also working on the screenplay to The Abstinence Teacher for Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).[4]
In January 2007, Perrotta was on the guest faculty for the third annual Writers in Paradise conference at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.[5] On January 23, 2007, he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Little Children.
[edit] Works
- The Abstinence Teacher (Fall 2007)[6]
- Little Children (2004) (movie link)
- Joe College: A Novel (2000)
- Election (1999) (movie link)[7]
- The Wishbones (1997)
- Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies (1994)
[edit] Points of Interest
- The Joe College: A Novel (2000) was set at Yale University. The party that the main character ends up at is the infamous Halloween Party annually held at Manuscript Society, one of the secret senior groups at Yale).[citation needed]
- Perrotta's newest novel, The Abstinence Teacher, is, according to the author, "all about sex education and the culture wars. It's close in spirit to Little Children, I think." [8]
- Perrotta was invited to teach at Eckerd College by Dennis Lehane. According to the author, "the short version is, Dennis invited me. We taught together at Stonecoast Writers Conference" in Maine [9]
- Perrotta has great admiration for his former teacher Tobias Wolff, who in such books as his memoir This Boy's Life achieves the blend of "comic writing and moral seriousness" Perrotta strives for in his fiction.[10]
