Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle, also known as T.C. Boyle, born on December 2, 1948) is a U.S. novelist and short story writer. Since the mid 1970s. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. Boyle has been a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California since 1978, when he founded the school's undergraduate creative writing program.
Easton Press T. C. Boyle books
World's End - signed modern classic - 2014
Franklin Library T. C. Boyle books
The Road to Wellville - signed first edition - 1993
Riven Rock - signed first edition - 1998
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Author T. C. Boyle
Boyle was born in Peekskill, New York, the small town on the Hudson Valley that he regularly fictionalizes as Peterskill (as in his widely anthologized short story, "Greasy Lake"). Boyle changed his middle name when he was 17 and exclusively used Coraghessan for much of his career, but now also goes by T.C. Boyle.
Boyle earned a BA in English and history from the State University of New York at Potsdam in 1968, after which he taught for four years at Lakeland High School (Shrub Oak, New York), the school in his home town where his mother worked as head secretary and his father as a janitor. He also taught 9th grade English at Drum Hill in the City of Peekskill. After being accepted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1972, Boyle served as fiction editor for The Iowa Review, and in 1977 received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Boyle has since received many literary awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Malamud Prize, the PEN/West Literary Prize, the Commonwealth Gold Medal for Literature, the National Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Prose Excellence. His short fiction has won him six O. Henry Awards for short fiction, and multiple appearances in the Best American Short Story awards.
Boyle earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974 and his Ph.D. degree in 19th-century British literature in 1977. He has been a member of the English Department at the University of Southern California since 1978, and currently lives in Santa Barbara, in a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home, with his wife and three children.
Many of Boyle's novels and short stories explore the Baby boom generation, its appetites, joys, and addictions. His themes, such as the often-misguided efforts of the male hero and the slick appeal of the anti-hero, appear alongside brutal satire, humor, and magic realism. His fiction also explores the ruthlessness and the unpredictability of nature and the toll human society unwittingly takes on the environment. His work has been compared to Mark Twain's for its mixture of humor and social exploration.
His novels include World's End (1987, winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction); The Road to Wellville (1993); and The Tortilla Curtain (1995, winner of France's Prix Medicis Etranger). Boyle has published eight collections of short stories, including Descent of Man (1979), Greasy Lake (1985), If the River was Whiskey (1989), and Without a Hero (1994). His short stories regularly appear in the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and Playboy, as well as on Selected Shorts, a radio show recorded live at New York’s Symphony Space and broadcast on NPR.
T. C. Boyle books in order
Water Music (1982)
Budding Prospects (1984)
World's End (1987)
East Is East (1990)
The Road to Wellville (1993)
The Tortilla Curtain (1995)
Riven Rock (1998)
A Friend of the Earth (2000)
Drop City (2003)
The Inner Circle (2004)
Talk Talk (2006)
The Women (2009)
When the Killing's Done (2011)
San Miguel (2012)
The Harder They Come (2015)
The Terranauts (2016)
Outside Looking In (2019)
Talk to Me (2021)
Blue Skies (2023)
No Way Home (2026)
Short story collections
Descent of Man (1979)
Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)
If the River Was Whiskey (1989)
Without a Hero (1994)
T.C. Boyle Stories (1998), compiles four earlier volumes of short fiction plus seven previously uncollected stories
After The Plague (2001)
Tooth and Claw (2005)
The Human Fly (2005), previously published stories collected as young adult literature
Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)
T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013)
The Relive Box & Other Stories (2017)
I Walk Between the Raindrops (2022)
Anthology
DoubleTakes (2004, co-edited with K. Kvashay-Boyle)
Source and additional information: T. C. Boyle