Thomas M. Rutter
This is Tom Rutter’s first novel but he has been a writer all of his life. He was conceived in Chicago, Illinois during the Battle of the Bulge and born just two days after the final surrender which marked the end of World War II in 1945. He was birthed from the Greatest Generation and listened to the stories of WWII and their unambiguous definition of right and wrong but he grew up in the Sixties in a nebulous world of searching and dreaming. At the time of his birth in the same Chicago hospital as Ernest Hemingway, Christine and the American would have been sitting in the cafes of post-war Paris journaling her life.
Between Tom’s conception and his birth many significant WWII events occurred:
• Three world leaders die; U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, German Nazi Dictator Adolph Hitler and Italian Dictator Benito Mussolini.
• Heinrich Himler, Head of the Gestapo and Joseph Gobbles, Nazi Propagandist both committed suicide.
• The young, Jewish diarist Anne Frank was captured and then murdered in a German death camp.
• Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians were killed in the final nine and one half months of ruthless, mechanized fighting in Europe and the Pacific.
• Two atomic bombs were dropped on the people of Japan killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and finally ending WWII.
• World War II ended on both fronts. Total victory was achieved for the Allies through unconditional surrender of the German and Japanese.
Hence Tom’s obsession with WWII.
Tom’s mother was Inez Pizzica (deceased), a first generation Italian American whose family is from areas near Pescara and Sulmona in the Abruzzo Provence of Italy. His father is Harold Rutter (presently 97 years old) whose English/German family has an American connection dating back to the early American settlers in Baltimore, Maryland.
Tom first traveled to Paris as a college student in the summer of 1967, when he fell in love with the City of Lights. He has been drawn back to “her” many times and will live there someday. He is eternally grateful to those who prevented Hitler from destroying Paris in August 1944, though he doubts the validity of the official version of that event.
Before entering the “real world” of work, Tom spent two years living in the jungles of Malaysia and on the streets of Singapore as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer. The professions which took Tom away from his creative side were many years as a student financial aid administrator (University of California Davis, University of California San Diego and San Francisco State University), Associate Vice President for Enrollment Planning and Management at San Francisco State University and as the Chief Financial Officer for a San Francisco law firm.
During the writing of For the Love of Paris, Tom visited Paris often and lived in Montalcino, Italy and Mill Valley, California with his attorney wife Donna Marie (Lumia) and their daughter Justine. Tom has two grown children, Matthew and Caroline; a daughter-in-law, Courtney Murren; and twin grandchildren, John Solomon Rutter and Maria Sophia Rutter.
For the Love of Paris emerged from Tom’s mind in March 2007 as he sat on a bench along the Champs Elysees reading Alistair Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris. The initial story was transmitted to his wife Donna via his BlackBerry in a series of emails as he walked the Paris streets and sat in her cafes.
Now Paris has let Tom into her heart, now much of the loneliness of being a traveler in Paris and the pain of watching lovers holding each other on the banks of the Seine has subsided. Traveling to Paris has finally become comfortable, more like returning again and again to visit an old friend.
