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Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American author. Tartt's novels are The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch in 2014. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.

Early life

Tartt was born, the elder of two daughters, in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. Her father, Don Tartt, was a rockabilly musician, turned freeway "service station owner-cum-local politician", while her mother, Taylor, was a secretary. Her parents were avid readers, and her mother would read while driving.

In 1968, aged five, Tartt wrote her first poem.

In 1976, aged thirteen, Tartt was published for the first time when a sonnet was included in The Mississippi Review.

In high school, Tartt was a freshman cheerleader for the basketball team and worked in the public library.

In 1981, Tartt enrolled in the University of Mississippi where her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. Finding her in the Holiday Inn bar one evening, Morris said to her, "My name is Willie Morris, and I think you're a genius."

Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary", said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. 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 also met Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt, graduating in 1986.

Career

Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History in 1992. Amanda Urban was her agent and the novel became a marketing, critical, and financial achievement. Vanity Fair called Tartt a precocious literary genius, as she was just 29 years old, which set high expectations for what she would publish next.

In 2002, Tartt's novel The Little Friend was first published in Dutch, since 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 stirred reviewers as to whether it was a literary novel, a controversy possibly based on its best-selling status. The book was adapted for the movie The Goldfinch. Tartt was reportedly paid $3m for the movie rights but parted company with her long-standing agent, Amanda Urban, over the latter's failure to secure Tartt a role in the screenplay writing or wider production. The movie was a critical and commercial failure.

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). In her essay Tartt 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".

She has spent about ten years writing each of her novels.

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; that she is 5ft tall and that she had said she would never get married. In 2013, she claimed that she was not a recluse while stressing the freedoms of shutting the door, closing the curtains and not participating in the life of culture. In 2016, Tartt's cousin, police officer James Lee Tartt, was killed while on duty.

Awards

• 2003 WH Smith Literary Award – The Little Friend
• 2003 Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist – The Little Friend
• 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award (fiction) shortlist – The Goldfinch
• 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction shortlist – The Goldfinch
• 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – The Goldfinch
• 2014 Time 100 Most Influential People
• 2014 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence for Fiction – The Goldfinch
• Vanity Fair International Best Dressed List, 2014

fashion inspirations: Louise Brooks and Harold Chasen

• 2014 Malaparte Prize (Italy) – The Goldfinch

Bibliography

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

Nonfiction

• "Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine", Harper's Magazine 285.1706, July 1992, pp. 60–66

Tartt's great-grandfather gave the five-year-old, for tonsillitis, whiskey, and codeine cough syrup, for two years, when kept home due to tonsillitis, she would read and write poetry.

• "Basketball Season" in The Best American Sports Writing, edited and with an introduction by Frank Deford, Houghton Mifflin, 1993
• "Team Spirit: Memories of Being a Freshman Cheerleader for the Basketball Team", Harper's Magazine 288.1727, April 1994, pp. 37–40
• "My friend, my mentor, my inspiration". in Remembering Willie. University Press of Mississippi. 2000. ISBN 978-1-57806-267-6. This book of memorials collects twenty-seven eulogies and tributes.
• “Afterword” in True Grit, Charles Portis, Overlook Press, New York, 2010, pp. 255-267

Audiobooks

• The Secret History
• The Little Friend (abridgement)
• True Grit (with an afterword expressing her love of the novel)
• Winesburg, Ohio (selection)

Sources

• Hargreaves, Tracy (2001). Donna Tartt's "The Secret History". New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8264-5320-1.
• Kakutani, Michiko (1992). "Students Indulging in Course of Destruction". The New York Times, September 4, 1992.
• Kaplan, James (September 1992). "Smart Tartt". Vanity Fair.
• McOran-Campbell, Adrian (August 2000). The Secret History.
• Tartt, Donna (2000). "Spanish Grandeur in Mississippi". Oxford American, Fall 2000.
• Yee, Danny (1994). "Studying Ancient Greek Warps the Mind of the Young?"
• Corrigan, Yuri (December 1, 2018). "Donna Tartt's Dostoevsky: Trauma and the Displaced Self". Comparative Literature. 70 (4): 392–407. doi:10.1215/00104124-7215462. S2CID 165480509.

External links

• Donna Tartt interviewed by Robert Birnbaum at identitytheory.com
• Tartt Interview with Jill Eisenstadt in Bomb
• Steinz, Pieter (March 14, 1993). "Donna Tartt, in conversation". The John Adams Institute. De Kleine Komedie, Amsterdam. Retrieved February 1, 2021. Moderator: Pieter Steinz; In collaboration with: Uitgeverij Anthos, Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken Den Haag, Anjerfonds Amsterdam, United States Information Service the Hague 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 and Lorrie Moore talk about the writing process". YouTube.
• 10 Best Dressed People of 2013, The Guardian
• Donna Tartt interviewed by James Naughtie at BBC Radio 4 – Bookclub (January 5, 2014)