Donna Tartt

American · born 1963

Born Donna Louise Tartt on December 23, 1963, in Greenwood, Mississippi, and raised in nearby Grenada, the daughter of Don Tartt, a rockabilly-musician-turned-service-station-owner, and his wife Taylor, a secretary, she was a tiny, fierce child whose mother liked to read aloud while driving. She memorised long stretches of A. A. Milne before she could read herself and published her first sonnet in the Mississippi Review at thirteen. In high school she worked in the public library and wrote, by her own account, short stories about death. She enrolled at the University of Mississippi in 1981, pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma, and one evening was found at the Holiday Inn bar by the southern writer Willie Morris, who pronounced her a genius; on his recommendation, Barry Hannah admitted the eighteen-year-old to his graduate course on the short story. She transferred to Bennington College in 1982, studied classics with Claude Fredericks, and counted among her classmates Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt, graduating in 1986 with a degree in philosophy. The Secret History (1992), drawn from her Bennington years, was published when she was twenty-eight after eight years of work, sold five million copies, and effectively invented the dark academia register. The Little Friend (2002) came a decade later and was first published in Dutch, where her sales per capita ran highest. The Goldfinch (2013), a thousand pages on a Carel Fabritius painting and a New York boy made orphan by a museum bombing, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year. She writes roughly one book per decade, lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, dislikes book tours, and remains, by long-standing preference, almost wholly absent from public life.