Thomas Cullinan was an American author and playwright originally from Cleveland, Ohio. He attended Case Western Reserve University, where he began a relationship with the Cleveland Play House. In the 1950s, he wrote for television and began earning recognition for his plays. He was awarded a grant to travel to Berlin, where he wrote The Sentinel. In the late 1960s, he was the Playwright in Residence at the University of Utah.
In 1968, Cleveland Play House produced Cullinan’s play Mrs. Lincoln, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s widow, Mary, and her real-life hospitalization for mental illness in the wake of her husband’s assassination. The play was well-received and has been produced throughout the country. Cullinan also found success as a novelist. His most popular novel was The Beguiled, about a Union soldier recuperating in Confederate Mississippi during the Civil War. Cullinan died of a heart attack in 1995.
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