Thomas R. Perrotta (born Aug 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. Perrotta co-wrote the screenplay for the 2006 film version of Little Children with Todd Field, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. He is also known for his novel The Leftovers (2011), which has been adapted into a TV series on HBO. 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. He has participated in turning his novel The Leftovers into an HBO TV series of the same name that began running in 2014 to critical acclaim for three seasons Less