Donna Tartt Biography

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Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt has written two novels concerning murders. Her first, The Secret History, the story of murderous college students at an elite Ivy league school, was a sensation. The book earned Tartt a staggering advance of $450,000, sold some one million copies, and was translated into twenty-three languages. After this tremendous debut, Tartt was silent for ten years. But in 2002, she reemerged with her second novel, The Little Friend, the story of twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, who is intent on avenging the murder of her older brother. Writing in the New Republic, Ruth Franklin called Tartt "one of the most mesmerizing writers of her generation."

A Southern Childhood

Tartt was raised in Grenada, Mississippi, a small town where she spent much of her time reading books. "When you read, it's very much about wanting to go somewhere else," she explained to Liz Seymour in Book. "And when you're a child, particularly when you're a child trapped in a small town, reading is a drug." Her favorites were the classics, like Treasure Island, Huckleberry Finn, Kidnapped, and Peter Pan. Reading inspired her to write her own stories, something she has been doing since the age of four. She had her first poem published in a school magazine at the age of thirteen, and all through high school she worked at the local library. Tartt went on to attend the University of Mississippi, which she found too stifling, before transferring to Bennington College in Vermont. She was mentored by the Mississippi writer and editor Willie Morris, but contends that she had little interest in Southern writing, apart from the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

While still at Bennington, Tartt began writing the novel that became The Secret History. The story is based in part on a real group of friends, eager to become writers, who collected around a professor of classics at Bennington. Among the group was Tartt and her friend, novelist Brett Easton Ellis, author of Less Than Zero. When she finished the novel in 1991, Ellis read the manuscript and introduced Tartt to agent Amanda Urban, "a name synonymous with hot young authors," according to Daniel Max in Elle. Tartt's phenomenal publishing deal for The Secret History generated a vast amount of publicity. The author was profiled in a number of major magazines, including Vanity Fair, Elle, Esquire, and Mirabella.

Publishes The Secret History

The Secret History tells of a group of college students who assemble themselves into an exclusive clique, eschewing the common activities of college life. A collective attitude of moral superiority and an interest in classics bind the group together, but erodes their values to the point where murder becomes an acceptable notion. The Secret History, Patricia Holtz summed up in the Toronto Globe and Mail, is the story "of would-be intellectuals devoid . . . of traditional moral character" and "of criminal acts committed by amateurs . . . and the resulting repercussions."

The Secret History is less a mystery--the killers are revealed on the first page--than "an exploration of evil, both banal and bizarre," in the words of Martha Duffy in Time. The story is narrated by Richard Papen, a transfer student who disavows his own middle-class upbringing to gain entrance into an elitist circle of students. "The gradual moral seduction of Richard is all the more cleverly revealed by its depiction in his own voice," commented Andrew Rosenheim in the New York Times Book Review. As Richard becomes accepted by the group, he learns that four out of the five other members had participated in the bloody murder of a farmer who interrupted their late-night "bacchanal." When one among the small coterie threatens to betray this dark secret, that person, too, is killed. "Tartt shows a superior sense of pace, playing off her red herrings and foreshadowings like an old hand at the suspense game," Duffy stated in Time. In the New York Times Book Review Rosenheim praised Tartt's "skillful investigation of the chasm between academe's supposed ideals and the vagaries of its actual behavior" and further commented that her prose was "at once lush and precise." Nancy Wood, reviewing The Secret History in Maclean's, believed that Tartt "is strongest when she finds poetry in everyday events: the sights and smells of a campus, the familiarity of certain television shows." The Secret History, Wood concluded, "stands out as well-written and original."

"I never set out to write a bestselling novel with my first book," Tartt explained to Seymour. "I just wanted to write the kind of book that I wanted to write." While fans expected a new novel at any time, Tartt bought a farm in Virginia, spent time in France, walked her three dogs, and read. She also worked on an earlier novel idea, a novel inspired by imagining how a girl character would behave in some of the classic stories of literature that feature boys. "It struck me that if Jim Hawkins (in Stevenson's Treasure Island) had been a little girl, he would have acted differently," Tartt told Dylan Foley in the Denver Post. "Little girls are craftier, they play with their cards closer to their vests, they hold grudges. I thought it would be interesting to see how a little girl would react."

A Long Silence Ends

The Little Friend begins with the murder of nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes, who is found hanging from a tree in his family's front yard. Some twelve years later, his sister Harriet, who was just a baby at the time of the murder, decides to unravel the mystery of Robin's death and to punish the killer. Joined in her sleuthing by her friend Hely, she finds that a friend of Robin's, a boy who has now become a local dealer in methamphetamine, may be the murderer. Harriet plots revenge involving the use of a deadly cobra, but her romantic notions of justice clash with real-world dangers. What begins as a quiet story of a family's grief over a son's death grows into a fast-paced narrative of revenge and violence. Because of this change in the novel's pace, not all critics thought the novel worked. Michelle Vellucci in People, for example, believed that The Little Friend "can't decide whether to be a thriller or a coming-of-age story." But according to Tom Chiarella in Esquire, "Tartt is able to quietly transform the book from a patient study of a family's disassembly and despair to a gut-thumping story of a little girl seeking a measure of understanding and well-deserved revenge." "Tartt has created in Harriet an indomitable and extremely likable character, fierce and proud, reminiscent of Scout in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird," Vince Passaro wrote in Oprah Magazine. Sven Birkerts in Book described the book as "a vast, thickly woven and defyingly unchic work of immersed imagination."

Speaking of her writing style, Tartt told Amy Cameron of MacLean's: "I write the only way I know how, which is actually fairly painstakingly and fairly slowly. I'm happy when I'm tinkering around with a sentence or a word, adjective, comma. I am absolutely the happiest when I am noodling around on a tiny level." She told Foley that she writes her books in longhand. "I write in these spiral composition notebooks, like the ones I used to have in school. They have to be big fat ones, because I write big fat novels. When I can't find a notebook, I'm like Medea, storming through the house: 'Where's my notebook"'"