Tom Perrotta
Thomas R. Perrotta ( born August 13, 1961 in Garwood, New Jersey) is an American author and screenwriter.
Life
Perrotta was born into a Catholic Albanian family from Italy. Already at school age he wrote for his school newspaper short stories. At Yale University, he earned his bachelor 's degree in English and then went to Syracuse University, where he graduated with the degree Master of Arts in Creative Writing. One of his teachers there was Tobias Wolff.
Perrotta went in the subsequent period as a lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University. During these years, he completed three novels, of which so far only two have been published. In 1994 he published a collection of short stories. In 1997 his first novel, The Wishbones.
Perrotta 's novel The Election was discovered by film director Alexander Payne as a template for a movie and released in 1998 as a book. The film itself came in April 1999 with the cast Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon in the movie theaters.
His novel Little Children was in 2004 Perrotta breakthrough. He has won many awards. The screenplay for the film version from 2006, which he co-wrote with Todd Field, has been nominated for several film awards, as well as for the Oscars 2007. Afterwards he wrote more screenplays, so for Rob Greenberg's Barry and Stan Gone Wild.
Perrotta, 2007 was a guest lecturer at the invitation of Dennis Lehane at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg ( Florida). The two writers had previously met at the Stone Coast Writers Conference in Portland (Maine).
Perrotta has been married since 1991 and lives with his wife and two children in Boston, Massachusetts.