Happy Birthday T. C. Boyle

image lifted from here

It's the birthday of novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle, (books by this author) also known as T. Coraghessan Boyle, born Thomas John Boyle in Peekskill, New York (1948). His father was a janitor and school bus driver, his mother was a secretary, and both were alcoholics, and they both died from alcohol-related illnesses in their 50s. He was a poor student, but in order to avoid the draft he got a job as a high school teacher in Peekskill, where he had grown up. And he decided he wanted to become a writer. He said: "My apprenticeship was spent in dark bars till late at night — and in New York they stay open till four — with a bunch of other Deadheads, telling them how I was going to write and arguing various points of aesthetics. After a couple of years of that, I thought, well gee, maybe I actually might want to try to write something." And he did. He got a couple of stories published, and he got accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and he went on to write novels and books of short stories, including The Tortilla Curtain (1995), After the Plague (2001), Drop City (2003), and most recently, The Women (2009), a novel based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, which T.C. Boyle was inspired to write because he lives in a house in California designed by the architect.

text lifted from The Writer's Almanac