10 Facts About Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta is known for his novel The Leftovers, which has been adapted into a TV series on HBO.

Tom Perrotta was born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Garwood, New Jersey, where he spent his entire childhood, and was raised Roman Catholic.

Tom Perrotta's 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.

Tom Perrotta was involved in his high school literary magazine, Pariah, for which he wrote several short stories.

Tom Perrotta married writer Mary Granfield in 1991, and they have two children.

In 1997 he published The Wishbones, his first novel, which Tom Perrotta has said is basically "about my high school years".

In 2006, Tom Perrotta sold New Line Cinema an original screenplay he co-wrote with Frasier producer Rob Greenberg.

In January 2007, Tom Perrotta was on the guest faculty for the third annual Writers in Paradise conference at Eckerd College in St Petersburg, Florida.

Tom Perrotta was invited to teach at Eckerd by Dennis Lehane; the two writers had previously taught together at Stonecoast Writers Conference in Maine.

Tom Perrotta has participated in turning his novel The Leftovers into an HBO TV series of the same name that began running in 2014 to critical acclaim for three seasons.