Boyle was born Thomas John Boyle to a second-generation Irish American father and a mother of Dutch-Irish descent, in Peekskill, New York, on 2 December 1948. At seventeen Boyle, who was named after his father, changed his name to T. Coraghessan Boyle, largely as an attempt to distance himself from his alcoholic father and emerge from the lackluster background of a lower-middle-class upbringing. The pronunciation of Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), a name from the family of his mother, Rosemary Post McDonald Boyle, has been a source of confusion for readers, even providing the idea for a New Yorker cartoon in which a character asks for "a book by T. What's-His-Face Boyle." After a barely mediocre academic career at the State University of New York College at Potsdam, where he attempted to study music, Boyle graduated in 1968. Inspired by a creative-writing course he had taken at Potsdam, Boyle continued to write short stories while he taught English to tough adolescents in a Hudson Valley public high school. One of his early stories, "The OD and Hepatitis Railroad or Bust," was published in the North American Review (Fall 1972), easing the way to Boyle's acceptance in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa.
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