Tom Cole (writer)

Charles Thomas "Tom" Cole (April 8, 1933 – February 23, 2009) was a playwright and screenwriter. He wrote the screenplay for Smooth Talk.

Charles Thomas (Tom) Cole was born in 1933 in Paterson, New Jersey. His father, David L. Cole, the son of Russian immigrants, was one of the early pioneers in arbitrating labor disputes, serving under every US President from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. Tom Cole attended public schools in Paterson then went on to receive his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in American History & Literature. After graduating in 1954, he enlisted in the United States Army where he was assigned to study Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey, California. He was assigned to Moscow in the Summer of 1959 as an interpreter at the American National Exhibition, which exhibited American art, culture, science and technology to residents of the Soviet Union. He was responsible for describing American farm machinery to visitors and was an observer at the impromptu Kitchen Debate, between Vice President of the United States, Richard Nixon and Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev. He returned to Harvard, where he was awarded a master's degree in Slavic Languages and Literature. He was on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching Russian and English literature from 1964-1971 and was instrumental in starting a film program there.

Mr. Cole's writing activities have spanned fiction, theater, film and translation. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, Mr. Cole's short stories were published in the Atlantic, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Kenyon Review and other magazines. His first story, Familiar Usage in Leningrad, won the Atlantic 'First' Award in 1961 and was a top winner in the O'Henry Prize Stories anthology (Doubleday, N.Y., 1962). His stories were also included in the 1966 and 1970 editions of the same yearly collection. The immense Journey of the Late Season Traveler was anthologized in All Our Secrets Are The Same: New Fiction From Esquire. His volume of fiction, An End to Chivalry, a short novel and five stories, published by Atlantic-Little Brown, received the Rosenthal Award of the Academy of Arts & Letters in 1966.

The story of Dwight H. Johnson, a black Vietnam War veteran who had won the Medal of Honor for valor in combat and was shot and killed by police in 1971 while holding up a Detroit convenience store, became the impetus for Medal of Honor Rag, a two-character play that fictionalized the story as a confrontation set at an Army Hospital in 1971 between Dale Jackson, a troubled black war hero and a white psychiatrist who specializes in "impacted grief". First produced in Boston and Washington, DC at the Folger Theater, it was staged at the Theater De Lys in New York in 1976 with Howard Rollins as Johnson and David Clennon as the psychiatrist. In his review in The Washington Post, Richard Cox described the play as "extraordinary in concept and performance"; The New York Times' critic, Clive Barnes, wrote that "It is a remarkably effective, strong and harrowing play." Medal of Honor Rag was a nominee for both the Drama Desk and Obie Awards before moving on to regional theaters across the country. A television version of the play was broadcast in April 1982 on PBS's American Playhouse, directed by Lloyd Richards and produced by Joyce Chopra.

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