Charles Tom Cole

Playwright and screenwriter Charles Tom Cole (1933-2009) was born in Paterson, NJ and graduated from Harvard University in 1954. Upon entering the Army, Cole was sent to learn Russian in Monterey, California and this led to his 1959 travels to the Soviet Union as an interpreter for the American government. Cole later returned to the United States, earning a master’s degree in Russian at Harvard and teaching Russian and English literature at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His experiences in Russia provided inspiration for his first book, An End to Chivalry (1965), which received the Rosenthal Award of the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1966. Cole’s writing on fiction, theatre, film, and translation appeared in numerous publications throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the Atlantic, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post and Kenyon Review. Between 1965 and 1977, Cole was in residence at MacDowell four times. He earned recognition for his screenplay for the 1986 film Smooth Talk and his two-character play Medal of Honor Rag, which was based on the true story of Dwight Johnson, a black Vietnam War veteran who was killed in 1971. His other notable plays include Fighting Bob (1981) and About Time (1990).