DONNA TARTT

Donna Tartt, in full Donna Louise Tartt, (born December

23, 1963, Greenwood, Mississippi, U.S.), American novelist
especially noted for her debut novel, The Secret
History (1992), and her third book, The Goldfinch (2013).
Tartt grew up in the small town of Grenada, Mississippi. She
was a bookish child. When she was only 5 years old, she
wrote her first poem, and at 13 years of age, she had
a sonnet published.
She is a writer who received critical acclaim for her first
two novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into
thirty languages. Tartt was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little
Friend. Her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014.
The Secret History is told from the point-of-view of Richard Papen, a working class
college student from California who transfers to an elite college in Vermont. There, he falls
in with a strange group of classics scholars and becomes embroiled in a world of rituals,
intrigue, and even murder. 
This book was characterized as a “murder mystery in reverse”; the details of the
murder were revealed in the early pages of the work. The book was on The New York
Times best-seller list for 13 weeks.
Michiko Kakutani’s original review of The Secret History in The New York
Times presaged what has happened with the novel in the 30 years since it was published. It
has become a cult favorite; it is a widely quoted, read and enjoyed book, but not
necessarily a text that’s highly respected by those who decide the literary canon. People
still debate whether the novel is bad or good, but its many readers are not concerned about
that. Kakutani calls the characters “silly” and says the author doesn’t achieve the “moral
resonance” of a Dickens or Dostoevsky, but the reviewer concedes that the novel is a real
page turner. “As a ferociously well-paced entertainment, however, The Secret
History succeeds magnificently,” she wrote.
It was 10 years before Tartt published her eagerly anticipated second work, The Little
Friend (2002), which was set in the South and traced the attempt of a 12-year-old girl to
avenge the death of her brother. In terms of tone, setting, and plot, the work was almost
the antithesis of her first novel. The Little Friend won the WH Smith Literary Award in
2003.
Eleven years after the publication of The Little Friend, The Goldfinch appeared. The
title refers to an exquisite 1654 painting—not much bigger than a standard sheet of paper
—by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius (1622–54) that serves as the plot device that drives
the story. Many readers found the work to be a significant addition to the literature of
trauma and memory and a highly engaging meditation on the power of art. In 2014 the
novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
In addition to winning the Pulitzer, Tartt also received in 2014 the Andrew
Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Goldfinch. A film adaptation of the novel
was released in 2019.