Donna Tartt

Donna Louise Tartt, born December 23, 1963, is an American novelist whose career has been marked by long periods of private work and a small, closely watched body of fiction. She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, to Don and Taylor Tartt, and raised in nearby Grenada. Her father was a rockabilly musician who later became a freeway service station owner and local politician; her mother was a secretary. Both parents were avid readers, and Tartt grew up in a house where books were a daily presence.

Tartt began writing very young. She wrote her first poem in 1968, at age five, and was first published at 13, when a sonnet appeared in a 1976 edition of the Mississippi Review. In high school she was a freshman cheerleader for the basketball team, worked in the public library, wrote prize-winning essays about patriotism and alcoholism, and also wrote “short stories about death.” As a child she memorized long poems by A. A. Milne and later described herself as “this sort of horrible repository of doggerel verse.”

In 1981 Tartt entered the University of Mississippi, where she joined Kappa Kappa Gamma and wrote short stories for The Daily Mississippian. An editor showed one of her stories to Willie Morris, who found her one evening at the Holiday Inn bar and called her “a genius.” With Morris’s recommendation, Barry Hannah admitted the 18-year-old Tartt into his graduate short story course, describing her as “deeply literary” and “a literary star.” In 1982 she transferred to Bennington College, where she studied classics with Claude Fredericks and met fellow students Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt. She graduated in 1986 with a degree in philosophy.

Tartt is best known for three novels: The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). She has spent about ten years writing each novel. The Secret History, drawn from her time at Bennington, took eight years to write and became both a critical and financial success. It also originated the dark academia literary aesthetic, which The New York Times said caused it to “explode like a firework” in the literary scene. The Little Friend won the 2003 WH Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. The Goldfinch became a bestseller, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and was adapted into a 2019 film.

Her work has been shaped by wide reading, formal study, and a guarded sense of the writer’s private life. Tartt has named Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Vladimir Nabokov among her biggest influences. A convert to Catholicism, she contributed the essay “The Spirit and Writing in a Secular World” to The Novel, Spirituality and Modern Culture in 2000, writing that faith mattered to her work while also warning writers not to impose their beliefs directly on their novels. She has also said she dislikes book tours and public talks because they are mentally exhausting, while insisting she is not a recluse but someone who protects her privacy.

In 2014 Tartt was included in Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” list. Her fiction has drawn major prizes, strong sales, debate among critics, and close attention from readers. In November 2023, The Queen’s Reading Room released an interview in which she confirmed that she was working on her next novel. Tartt’s appeal rests partly in that patience: three novels over more than two decades, each made slowly, with a seriousness about reading, belief, style, and the hidden life of the mind.