Thomas R. Perrotta (born August 13, 1961) is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Academy Award-nominated films.

[1][2][3][4] Perrotta enjoyed reading authors such as O. Henry, J. R. R. Tolkien, and John Irving, and decided early in his life that he wanted to be a writer.

[12] The unpublished manuscript of Election was optioned as a screenplay in 1996 by director Alexander Payne, which then led to interest in publishing it as a book.

[14] For his part, Perrotta describes himself as a writer in the "plain-language American tradition" of authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver.

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

As of October 2007, he was working on a film adaptation of the book with Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who directed Little Miss Sunshine.

He and Damon Lindeloff adapted his novel, The Leftovers, into an HBO TV series of the same name that began running in 2014 to critical acclaim for three seasons.