Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an
American writer who received critical acclaim for her two novels, The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend
(2002). Tartt was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for The
Little Friend.
The daughter of Don and Taylor Tartt, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi
but raised 32 miles away in Grenada, Mississippi. At age five, she wrote her first
poem, and she first saw publication in a Mississippi literary review when she was 13 years old.
Enrolling in the University of Mississippi in 1981, she pledged to the
sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma. Her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss Writer-in-Residence,
admitted Tartt into his graduate short story course where, stated Hannah, she ranked higher than the graduate students. Following
the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982.
There she met Bennington students Bret Easton Ellis and Jill Eisenstadt.
The Secret History
Tartt began writing her first novel, The Secret History, during her second year at Bennington. She graduated from
Bennington in 1986. After Ellis recommended her work to the literary agent Amanda Urban,
The Secret History was published in 1992, overwhelming the 75,000 first printing to become a bestseller, later translated into 24 languages.
The Secret History is set at a fictional college that closely resembles Tartt's alma
mater. The plot concerns a close-knit group of six students and their professor of
classics, who embark upon a secretive plan to stage a bacchanal. The first-person narrative is flavored heavily by the
differences within the group. These include: social class, privilege, intellect and sexual orientation. In a tone of quiet
melancholy, the narrator reflects on a variety of circumstances that lead ultimately to a murder within the group.
The fact of the murder, the location and the perpetrators are revealed in the opening pages, usurping the familiar framework
and accepted conventions of the murder mystery genre. Critic A.O. Scott labeled it "a murder mystery in reverse." [1] A core theme is the relation between education and morality and
the ultimate dissociation between the two by various characters. Evocative language captures the setting and environment,
intensifying the psychological interplay of the key figures -- the authoritative intellectual Henry, the enigmatic twins Camilla
and Charles, the all-American boy Bunny, the sensitive Francis and the lower-class Richard, who narrates.
The book was wrapped in a transparent acetate book jacket, an innovative design by Barbara De Wilde and Chip Kidd. According to Kidd, "The following season acetate jackets sprang up in bookstores like mushrooms on
a murdered tree." [2]
The Little Friend
The Little Friend, Tartt's second novel, also with a Chip Kidd jacket design, was published in October 2002. It is a
mystery centered on a young girl living in the American South in the
mid-20th Century. Her implicit anxieties about the long-unexplained death of her brother
and the dynamics of her extended family are a strong focus, as are the contrasting lifestyles and customs of small town
Southerners.
Recent events
A planned film adaptation of The Secret History has been announced. In 2002, it was reported that Tartt was working on
a retelling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of novellas in which ancient myths are reimagined and rewritten by contemporary
authors.[3] In August 2005, The Daily Telegraph reported that Tartt was working on her third novel, "a psychological
thriller featuring a group of people trapped in a lift."[4]
Bibliography
Novels
Short stories
- “A Christmas Pageant.” Harper’s 287.1723. December 1993, p. 45+.
- “A Garter Snake.” GQ 65.5, May 1995, p. 89+.
Nonfiction
- “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine.” Harper’s 286, July 1992, p. 60-66.
- “Basketball Season.” The Best American Sports Writing, edited and with an introduction by Frank Deford. Houghton
Mifflin, 1993.
- “Team Spirit: Memories of Being a Freshman Cheerleader for the Basketball Team.” Harper’s 288, April 1994, p.
37-40.
Awards
References
Sources
Listen to
External links
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