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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.Ann Patchett (April 23, 2014). "Donna Tartt" . Time.
Tartt wrote her first poem in 1968, when she was five years old. 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, and she also wrote "short stories about death" during this period.
In 1981, Tartt enrolled in the University of Mississippi, where she pledged for the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and wrote short stories for The Daily Mississippian. An editor at the paper gave one of her stories to prominent writer Willie Morris, who found Tartt at the Holiday Inn bar one evening and declared her "a genius".Oxford, Mississippi#Media 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. Tartt graduated in 1986 with a degree in philosophy.
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 language 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.
In 2016, Tartt's cousin, police officer James Lee Tartt, was killed while on duty.
As of 2016, Virginia Living published that Tartt lived with art gallery owner Neal Guma in Charlottesville, Virginia, on a property they purchased together in 1997. Tartt also dedicated her second novel to someone named Neal, although she did not elaborate on his identity.
Tartt is a convert to Catholic Church 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".
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