Donna Tartt

The title of Tartt’s first novel also is a fair description of her own attitude toward press interviews. She was born in 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, the elder of two daughters born to Don and Taylor Tartt, but she grew up in Grenada, Mississippi, on the eastern edge of the Delta. Details from her formative years are scant, but she appears to have been a precocious child with an early love for literature—she wrote her first poem at age five, published her first sonnet in a Mississippi literary review at thirteen.

In the fall of 1981, she entered the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a freshman, where one of her stories caught the attention of Willie Morris, then a writer-in-resident at the university. Finding her in the Holiday Inn bar one evening, Morris said to her, “My name is Willie Morris, and I think you’re a genius.”

Upon Morris’ recommendation, Barry Hannah (also a writer-in-resident at the university) admitted Tartt as a freshman into his graduate short story course where, Hannah says, she outperformed the graduate students. At the urging of Morris and others, Tartt transferred after her freshman year from Ole Miss to Bennington College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, where she made friends with novelists Bret Easton Ellis and Jill Eisenstadt. During her second year at Bennington, she began writing The Secret History.

Tartt began showing her novel soon after she began writing it to Ellis, one of the two people to whom the novel is dedicated. It was through Ellis that Tartt and her as-yet-unfinished novel were introduced to literary agent Amanda Urban, who accepted Tartt as an unsigned client. Two years later, Urban was able to stir up a bidding war among publishers for the 866-page manuscript; the winner was Knopf, who paid a massive $450,000 for the book and ordered a 75,000-copy first-printing (compared to about 10,000 copies that most first novels get). Even so, demand for the book was so tremendous that Knopf had to order unprecedented additional printings. The novel remained on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for thirteen weeks, reaching as high as number two.

The Secret History takes place at the fictional Hampden College, which like Bennington is a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Its story centers on a small group of overly refined and elite students of ancient Greek taught by an eccentric professor who accepts few students. When the narrator, Richard Papen, a penniless transfer student from suburban California, successfully hatches a scheme to join the group, he gradually becomes privy to the group's secret history: they had accidentally murdered a farmer in their successful attempt to recreate an ancient Greek bacchanal. However, Bunny Corcorran, the one member of the group who had not participated in the bacchanal, learns of the murder and begins to blackmail the others. As Bunny's sanity becomes questionable and he threatens to reveal their secret, Richard must choose whether to side with the group in their decision to murder Bunny in order to silence him.

Critical opinion of the novel has been mostly favorable. Some critics have faulted The Secret History for vapid characterization and artificial stylization, but most have praised the work as an outstanding achievement for a first novel. Variously interpreted as suspenseful mystery, an exploration of the nature of evil, and a comparison of classical and modern values and philosophy, The Secret History is a noteworthy debut from a talented contemporary author.

With the publication of The Little Friend in 2002, Tartt proves she is no one-hit wonder. Already critics have praised the novel for its prose style, sharp characterizations, and tense narrative.

(Article updated November 2002)