Life

Coughlin was born in New York City and grew up in Freeport, New York

Freeport, New York

Freeport is a village in the town of Hempstead, Nassau County, New York, USA, on the South Shore of Long Island. The population was 42,860 at the 2010 census. A settlement since the 1640s, it was once an oystering community and later a resort popular with the New York City theater community...

. He graduated from Freeport High School in 1976 and received a BA from Hofstra University

Hofstra University

Hofstra University is a private, nonsectarian institution of higher learning located in the Village of Hempstead, New York, United States, about east of New York City: less than an hour away by train or car...

 and an MFA from Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

.
He resides in New Jersey

New Jersey

New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...

 with his family.

Novelist

Coughlin's first novel, The Hero of New York, was finished when he was 23 years old and explored the dark side of the middle class suburban dream. New York Times reviewer, Dennis Smith (1986) wrote, "The Hero of New York is solid tough-guy entertainment, and Mr. Coughlin's descriptions can be hilarious." Coughlin’s second novel, Steady Eddie, is a coming-of-age story

Bildungsroman

In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...

 set in Long Island

Long Island

Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...

, New York in 1977. George Needham wrote "Coughlin neatly captures a person's essence in the simplest gesture, but each character is drawn with sympathy and wit, even when the characters themselves lack these attributes. A fine novel." Coughlin has published short stories in Doubletake Magazine, the South Dakota Review and DUCTS, an on-line magazine. His story, "The Grief Committee" was analyzed in The Politics of Mourning: Grief Management in a Cross-Cultural Fiction. Coughlin"s poetry has appeared in The Dead Mule – School of Southern Literature and Hanging Moss Journal.