ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thomas Cullinan was born in Cleveland in 1919 to an Irish Catholic family. He was a playwright, novelist and television screenwriter whose best-known work is the gothic Civil War novel The Beguiled (1966), which was filmed in 1971 starring Clint Eastwood and remade in 2017 in a version directed by Sofia Coppola and starring Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman. His other works include a second Civil War-themed novel, The Besieged (1973), The Eighth Sacrament (1977), a murder mystery set in a convent, and the occult horror novel The Bedeviled (1978). He died in 1995.