Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt was born on December 23, 1963, in Greenwood, Mississippi, and grew up in Grenada, a small town in the Mississippi Delta. Her Southern upbringing, steeped in the Gothic literary tradition of the region, gave her fiction its characteristic atmosphere of beauty undercut by darkness and its sensitivity to the ways the past haunts the present. She showed exceptional literary promise from childhood, publishing her first poem in a Mississippi literary journal at the age of thirteen. She studied classics and English at the University of Mississippi before transferring to Bennington College in Vermont, where she was a classmate of Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem and where the seeds of her first novel were planted in a creative writing class.
Tartt spent nearly a decade writing her debut, refining a narrative that drew on her classical education, her experience of the hothouse atmosphere of a small elite college, and her abiding interest in beauty and moral transgression. The result, The Secret History (1992), was published to enormous fanfare. The novel inverts the conventional mystery by revealing the murder in its opening lines and then unfolding the events that led to it: a group of classics students at a Vermont college who, in attempting to recreate an ancient Dionysiac ritual, commit a murder, and the psychological unraveling that follows. The book became an immediate bestseller and a defining novel of the early 1990s, launching what would be called the ‘dark academia’ literary genre.
The Goldfinch, Tartt’s third novel, published in 2013 after another decade of work, became a publishing phenomenon. Following Theo Decker from the aftermath of a terrorist bombing at a New York museum — in which his mother is killed and he instinctively takes a small Dutch Golden Age painting — through his adolescence and young adulthood, the novel traces a Dickensian arc across the American landscape. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, though it also attracted critical debate about the relationship between popular fiction and literary seriousness, a conversation that said as much about the state of literary culture as it did about the novel itself.
Tartt’s prose style is richly sensory and deliberately old-fashioned in the best sense: she writes long, architecturally complex sentences that accumulate detail and atmosphere with the patience of a nineteenth-century novelist. Her literary heroes include Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Henry Green, and her work shares their investment in plot, character, and moral seriousness. She writes slowly and at length, producing novels of genuine scope and weight that ask to be read with sustained attention.
With just three novels published over more than thirty years, Donna Tartt has established herself as one of the most distinctive and beloved novelists of her generation. Her work bridges the gap between literary ambition and popular appeal with unusual grace, and both The Secret History and The Goldfinch have achieved the status of modern classics, read and reread by successive generations of literary readers around the world.
