Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta is a bestselling American screenwriter and author of nine works of fiction, including Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), which were made into Oscar-nominated films. His novel The Leftovers (2011) became a critically acclaimed Peabody Award-winning HBO series.

Thomas R. Perrotta was born and grew up in New Jersey. During his youth, Tom was an avid reader of authors like O. Henry, J.R.R. Tolkien, and John Irving, which sparked his interest in pursuing a career in writing. Perrotta contributed to his school's literary magazine, Pariah, by writing several short stories.

He obtained a B.A. in English from Yale University in 1983 and received an M.A. in English/creative writing from Syracuse University. While at university, Perrotta was fortunate to have the novelist Tobias Wolff as a mentor.

Tom Perrotta made his literary debut in 1994 with Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies, a collection of short stories that The Washington Post lauded as "more powerful than any other coming-of-age novel."

That same year Perrotta left Yale to teach expository writing at Harvard University. Three years later, he published his first novel ("about my high school years"), The Wishbones (1997).

His unpublished manuscript, Election, drew the attention of director Alexander Payne, who optioned it for a screenplay in 1996. It led to a decision to release the story as a book, which arrived in stores in March 1998. The film adaptation premiered in 1999, starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, and helped cement Perrotta's reputation as a talented writer.

The black comedy film directed by Alexander Payne received an Academy Awards nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, a Golden Globe nomination for Witherspoon for Best Actress, and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Film in 1999. The film launched not only the career of the author but also helped actress Reese Witherspoon.

His next "breakout book" was Little Children (2004), which also became a Golden Globe-nominated film. Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film version of Little Children with Todd Field. The New York Times anointed him "an American Chekhov whose characters even at their most ridiculous seem blessed and ennobled by a luminous human aura."

The Leftovers, perhaps, became his best-known work. The novel has sold more than 200,000 copies.

Perrotta has a high hit rate for adaptations. All seven of his novels and one of his short-story collections have been optioned and translated into multiple languages.

His other books include Joe College (2000), The Abstinence Teacher (2007), short story collections Nine Inches (2013), Mrs. Fletcher 2017, and a sequel to Election, Tracy Flick Can't Win (2022).

Tom Perrotta now lives outside of Boston.

Photo credit: © Beowulf Sheehan (tomperrotta.net)