Tom Perrotta

Thomas R. Perrota is an American screenwriter and novelist best known for a series of suburbia novels, the most popular of which are the 2004 published “Little Children”, and the 1998 published “Election”. Both of the novels were eventually adapted into critically acclaimed movies that won Academy Award nominations. He was involved in the adaptation of his “Little Children” novel into a screenplay in 2006, playing the role of scriptwriter, an endeavor that got him a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Another of his novels has also been adapted into a TV series that runs on HBO. Tom Perrotta is from Garwood, New Jersey, a place where he spent most of his childhood. He is the son of an Albanian-Italian immigrant that worked as a secretary and an Italian immigrant father that worked for the postal services. His mother would later quit her job as secretary and stay at home to look after Perrotta and his brother and sister. From a very early age, Perrotta loved reading and would often be found with a copy of John Irving, J. R.R. Tolkien, or O, Henry. He always wanted to become a writer since he was a child and even wrote several short stories for Parish, his high school literary magazine. Perrotta got his Bachelors in Arts in English from Yale before going on to attain a Masters in Arts in Creative Writing/English from Syracuse University. It was at Syracuse that he studied under Tobias Wolff, who influenced him in the aspects of moral seriousness and comic writing. He is married to Mary Granfield with whom he lives with in Belmont, Massachusetts.