1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

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T. Coraghessan Boyle, The Tortilla Curtain

(New York: Viking, 1995)

A prolific writer of both short and long fiction—usually with a comic or satiric
edge—Thomas John Boyle was born on 2 December 1948, in Peekskill, New
York; he changed his middle name to the ethnically Irish “Coraghessan” when he
was seventeen and publishes as both T. Coraghessan Boyle and T. C. Boyle. By his
own account, his working-class Catholic family provided little access to intellec-
tual or cultural capital, and he was an indifferent student through his college years
at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Boyle had intended to study
music as an undergraduate but discovered both a greater talent and interest in lit-
erature and history. Upon completing his bachelor’s degree in 1968, Boyle taught
high-school English, began writing, and published his first short story, “The
OD & Hepatitis RR or Bust,” in The North American Review (Fall 1972). Boyle
leveraged this story into admission to the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
where he received his M.F.A. in 1974; he then completed his Ph.D. in English at
University of Iowa in 1977. Despite a declared emphasis in nineteenth-century
British literature, his dissertation was a creative project that developed into his
first book publication, the short-story collection, Descent of Man (1979).
Since 1978 Boyle has taught in the English department at the University
of Southern California, where he helped found that institution’s undergraduate
creative writing major. Married since 1974 and the father of three children, Boyle
and his family live near Santa Barbara, California, in a Frank Lloyd Wright–
designed home that they have restored. Boyle tours widely to promote and read
his fiction, continues to teach regularly at USC, gives interviews generously, and
maintains an active website with links to reviews, summaries, and study questions
about his work. He is a working writer who follows a daily regimen—a four-hour
stint at the computer every morning—that is more than simply discipline. In
“This Monkey, My Back,” (1999) Boyle asserts that, for him, writing “is a habit,
an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your
lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing,
call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea” (http://www.tcboyle.
com/page2.html?4).
Whether understood as writing junkie or disciplined craftsman, Boyle has
had a highly productive career. As of summer 2009 he had published eight
volumes of collected short fiction, twelve novels, and frequent short stories in
The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Granta, and other prestigious
literary venues. Ironically, such a large oeuvre can bring scorn from the literary
establishment, but Boyle’s productivity has been well rewarded. He is the recipi-
ent of, among many honors, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships
and a Guggenheim Fellowship; numerous O. Henry Awards for his short fiction;
a PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel of the year (1988 for World ’s End ); and,