thumb|Tartt's three novels in German, published by [[Goldmann (publisher)|Goldmann.]]

Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American novelist. She wrote the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a 2019 film of the same name. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.

Early life and education

Donna Louise Tartt was born on December 23, 1963, to Don and Taylor Tartt, in Greenwood, Mississippi. She was raised in the nearby town of Grenada. Her parents were avid readers, and her mother would read while driving. As a child, Tartt memorized "really long poems by A. A. Milne", and has described herself as "this sort of horrible repository of doggerel verse". She was first published at 13, when a sonnet was included in a 1976 edition of the Mississippi Review. In high school, she was a freshman cheerleader for the basketball team and worked in the public library. Tartt's essays about patriotism and alcoholism won prizes, Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the 18-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. Hannah referred to her as "deeply literary" and "a literary star".

In 1982, following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College. At Bennington, Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks, and met fellow students and future authors Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt.

Career

Donna Tartt has spent about ten years writing each of her novels. Her biggest influences as a writer include famous 20th-century authors such as Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith and Vladimir Nabokov.

The Secret History (1992) was derived from her time at Bennington College. She spent eight years writing. Amanda Urban was her agent and the novel became a critical and financial success. It originated the dark academia literary aesthetic, causing it to "explode like a firework" in the literary scene, according to The New York Times.

Tartt's novel The Little Friend (2002) was first published in Dutch because her books sold more per capita in the Netherlands than elsewhere.

In 2006, Tartt's short story "The Ambush" was included in the Best American Short Stories 2006.

Her 2013 novel The Goldfinch was a bestseller and received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, though some critics felt the novel was juvenile and not literary. The book was adapted into the movie The Goldfinch, which was a critical and commercial failure. Tartt was not given the option to write the screenplay or act as a producer for the film, and reportedly fired longtime agent Amanda Urban over the deal.

In November 2023, The Queen's Reading Room released an interview with Donna Tartt who confirmed that she was working on her next novel.

Personal life

In 2002, it was reported that Tartt had lived in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, and on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. She has stated that she will never marry. In a 2013 interview with The Irish Independent, Tartt stated that she dislikes going on book tours and giving talks, because she finds them mentally exhausting. She stressed that she was not a recluse but rather was maintaining her privacy, and asked rhetorically, "Was it Emerson who talked about the great freedom of American life as the freedom not to participate in the life of the culture, the freedom to shut the door, to close the curtains?" Tartt dedicated her second novel to someone named Neal, although she did not elaborate on his identity.

Tartt is a convert to Catholicism and contributed an essay, "The Spirit and Writing in a Secular World", to The Novel, Spirituality and Modern Culture (2000), edited by Paul Fiddes. In her essay she wrote that "faith is vital in the process of making my work and in the reasons I am driven to make it". However, Tartt also warned of the danger of writers who impose their beliefs or convictions on their novels. She wrote that writers should "shy from asserting those convictions directly in their work".

  • 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist – The Goldfinch
  • 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – The Goldfinch
  • 2014 Time 100 Most Influential People
  • 2014 Vanity Fair International Best Dressed List

Works

Novels

  • The Secret History (1992, Alfred A. Knopf)
  • The Little Friend (2002, Alfred A. Knopf)
  • The Goldfinch (2013, Little, Brown)

Short stories

  • "Tam-O'-Shanter", The New Yorker, April 19, 1993, pp. 90–91
  • "A Christmas Pageant", Harper's Magazine, 287.1723, December 1993, pp. 45–51
  • "A Garter Snake", GQ, 65.5, May 1995, pp. 89ff
  • "The Ambush", The Guardian, June 25, 2005; reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2006

Nonfiction

  • "Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine", Harper's Magazine 285.1706, July 1992, pp. 60–66
  • "Basketball Season", Oxford American, Issue 2, Fall 1992; reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing 1993, ed. Frank Deford, Houghton Mifflin, 1993, under the title "Basketball Season: Requiem of a Mississippi Cheerleader"
  • "Team Spirit: Memories of Being a Freshman Cheerleader for the Basketball Team", Harper's Magazine 288.1727, April 1994, pp. 37–40
  • "In Melbourne", Oxford American, Issue 6, March/April 1995
  • "Willie Morris (1934–1999)", a tribute, Oxford American, Issue 29, September/October 1999
  • "Spirituality in the Modern Novel", Oxford American, Issue 30, November/December 1999; published in book form as "The Spirit and Writing in a Secular World" in
  • "My friend, my mentor, my inspiration", in
  • "The Glory of J. F. Powers", Harper's Magazine, July 2000
  • "Spanish Grandeur in Mississippi" (Art Views column), Oxford American, Issue 41, Fall 2001
  • "Early Times in Mississippi", in the collective feature "Ode to Bourbon", Garden & Gun, Holiday 2007
  • "Donna Tartt on the Singular Voice, and Pungent Humor, of Charles Portis", The New York Times Book Review, June 9, 2020 (online); published in print as "True Grit", The New York Times Book Review, June 28, 2020, p. 1
  • "Art and Artifice", Harper's Magazine, July 2024

Introductions and contributions

  • "True Crime" (poem), in
  • "Editor's Choice: Erin Parish" (essay on the painter Erin Parish), Bomb, no. 56, Summer 1996
  • Catalog essay for Into the Blue Again, solo exhibition by Erin Parish, Jeffrey Coploff Fine Art, New York, 1997
  • "Portfolio: William Eggleston", Artforum International, vol. 40, no. 2, October 2001, p. 135
  • Introduction to ; reprinted as "Afterword" in the Overlook Press 2010 edition, pp. 255–267,
  • Contribution to Pen Meets Paint: 200 Years Mauritshuis, 200 Writers, 200 Paintings, Waanders Publishers / Mauritshuis, 2022,
  • Introduction to

Audiobooks read by Tartt

Works by Tartt

  • The Secret History
  • The Little Friend (abridged)
  • The Goldfinch

Works by others

  • True Grit by Charles Portis (Recorded Books, 2006) — read by Tartt, with her essay on the novel as afterword
  • Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (HarperAudio, 2003) — selections, in a multi-narrator edition with Richard Ford, Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Tobias Wolff, and Daniel Halpern

References

General references

  • Hargreaves, Tracy (2001). Donna Tartt's "The Secret History". New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group. .
  • Kakutani, Michiko (1992). "Students Indulging in Course of Destruction". The New York Times, September 4, 1992.
  • Kaplan, James (September 1992). https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1992/9/smart-tartt --> "Smart Tartt". Vanity Fair.
  • McOran-Campbell, Adrian (August 2000). The Secret History.
  • Tartt, Donna (2000). "Spanish Grandeur in Mississippi". Oxford American, Fall 2001.
  • Yee, Danny (1994). "Studying Ancient Greek Warps the Mind of the Young?"
  • Donna Tartt interviewed by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com
  • Tartt Interview with Jill Eisenstadt in Bomb
  • video at YouTube
  • Donna Tartt and Anne Rice interviewed by Ray Suarez, NPR: Talk of the Nation: (October 30, 1997)
  • Donna Tartt interviewed by Lynn Neary, NPR: Talk of the Nation: (November 5, 2002)
  • Tartt on reading and her Scottish grandmother at Maud Newton
  • Tartt in Vogue on her teenage worship of Hunter S. Thompson at Maud Newton
  • Donna Tartt interviewed by James Naughtie at BBC Radio 4 – Bookclub (January 5, 2014)