Tom McHale (novelist, born 1941)

American novelist
the other American novelist

Tom McHale (1941 – March 30, 1982) was an American novelist. His works include Principato, Farragan's Retreat (nominated for the National Book Award), Alinsky's Diamond, School Spirit, The Lady from Boston, and Dear Friends. He was born in Avoca, Pennsylvania, and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Iowa. He committed suicide in Florida in 1982.

Thomas "Tom" McHale was born in 1941 in Avoca, Pennsylvania located nine miles (15 km) southwest of Scranton. He was the eldest of six children from an Irish Catholic family. His family’s Irish American ethnicity and Roman Catholicism would become prominent elements in his novels.

After the success of his first novel, Principato in 1972, McHale secured the position of writer in residence at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey, a position he held until the end of his life. McHale took an interest in writing early on, however, after attending a wedding in Israel in the late 1960s he decided to "give the writing monster inside me a chance and stayed there a year to see what I could do, to see if anything came up. I wrote a first novel. It was so bad that I tore it up into little pieces, took it out to the Negev Desert and threw it all over."

Reviewers compared McHale's novels to those of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., John Updike and Philip Roth because of his black comic humor. They also saw considerable talent in his quickly growing body of work. An article in Life Magazine in 1971 went on to say that "McHale writes as if born to the craft. He imagines and schemes like a beery poet. He sees, pokes, probes. He tells fabulous jokes McHale's capacity to trigger emotions ranges from laughter to compassion to cold horror. Realism, pathos, mystery, Tom McHale is not another new writer. He is himself." By 1976, a review from Associated Press gave much credit to the novel School Spirit for grappling with "questions that men have long pondered, questions such as the sanctity of life, guilt, punishment, redemption, but instead of creating what should have been a heavy philosophic text, he successfully produced a comic novel that makes the reader think, even as he laughs." Not all reviews were favorable. In 1971 a scathing review of Farragan's Retreat noted that "this is an absurd book that started well. Now that this talented author has this novel out of his system, we can only hope that he'll live up to his potential."

McHale was married to Suzanne McHale and had homes in Kittery, Maine and Killington, Vermont.