In an article in Canada's National Post, Ben Kaplan writes about how writer Tom Perrotta nearly gave up his writing not long before his breakthrough. Perrotta has written six novels in all, including two that became popular films: Election and Little Children. Kaplan reports:
"In 1993, Perrotta, then teaching at Harvard, wrote Election. No one would publish it, and he figured he'd wear chalk on his sleeves forever. "I was a composition teacher, struggling financially, and thought I'd go on to an academic career," he says. He produced two more unheralded works of fiction, Bad Haircut, a fairly autobiographical collection of stories set in '70s New Jersey, and The Wishbones, about a greying wedding singer who doesn't want to settle down. It was a Hollywood producer who turned Perrotta into a successful commodity. After hearing him read at a college book store, she helped make Election, then unpublished, into the hot film of 1999.
"Total fluke," he says of his book's success on the big screen, which he followed up on by publishing Joe College the next year. "That experience, to say the least, changed things."
