While teaching creative writing at Yale, and which Perrotta described in 2004 as "a pretty good novel about a family that falls apart after winning the lottery." In 1994, Perrotta published his first book, a collection of short stories titled
Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies which
The Washington Post called "more powerful than any other
coming-of-age novel". The same year, Perrotta left Yale and began teaching expository writing at
Harvard University. The unpublished manuscript of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. It arrived in bookstores in March 1998, followed shortly by its
film adaptation, which was released in April 1999 to critical acclaim. and
People called him "the rare writer equally gifted at drawing people's emotional maps...and creating sidesplitting scenes". For his part, Perrotta describes himself as a writer in the "plain-language American tradition" of authors such as
Ernest Hemingway and
Raymond Carver. In 2006, Perrotta sold
New Line Cinema an original screenplay he co-wrote with
Frasier producer
Rob Greenberg. Titled
Barry and Stan Gone Wild, the screenplay is "a shameless comedy [about] a 40-something dermatologist who goes on spring break". In January 2007, Perrotta was on the guest faculty for the third annual Writers in Paradise conference at
Eckerd College in
St. Petersburg, Florida. Perrotta was invited to teach at Eckerd by
Dennis Lehane; the two writers had previously taught together at Stonecoast Writers Conference in
Maine. Perrotta's novel
The Abstinence Teacher was published on October 16, 2007. It is, according to the author, "all about sex education and the
culture wars. It's close in spirit to
Little Children, I think." It was chosen by
The New York Times as a 2007 Notable Book of the Year. 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. In 2010, 30,000 copies of his short story "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" were distributed as part of the
Boston Book Festival's "One City, One Story" project. Perrotta and
Damon Lindeloff adapted Perrotta's novel
The Leftovers into an
HBO TV series of
the same name that began running in 2014 to critical acclaim for three seasons. He later adapted his 2017 novel
Mrs. Fletcher into a
limited series, also for HBO. ==Bibliography==