T. Coraghessan Boyle

T.C.Boyle at Leipzig Book Fair 2009

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T. Coraghessan 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 has published twelve novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988 for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is married to Karen Kvashay, with whom he has three children, Kerrie, Milo, and Spencer. 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.

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 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.

Bibliography

Novels

• 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 (novel) (2011?)

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) - collects the four earlier volumes of short fiction, as well as seven previously uncollected stories.
• After the Plague (2001)
• Tooth and Claw (2005)
• The Human Fly (2005) (young adult literature)
• Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)

Edited anthology

• DoubleTakes (2004, co-edited with K. Kvashay-Boyle)

Chronology in Boyle's works

See also

• Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson

External links

• T. C. Boyle's author-run website: Includes reviews, excerpts, current events and contact info
• The T. Coraghessan Boyle Research Center (in English, French, German, and Dutch).
• German Website about T.C. Boyle
• Fogged Clarity's Interview with T.C. Boyle. (April, 2009)
• Interview with Boyle from the Leipziger Buchmesse (with German translation).
• Interview with Boyle and critical essays about his work.
• Interview with IdentityTheory.com
• Interview with 3:AM Magazine
• T. Coraghessan Boyle at the Internet Movie Database
• 2007 Evil Companions award (photo by Don Zirulnik)