Donna Tartt

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Donna Tartt

Born December 23, 1963 (1963-12-23) (age 44)
Greenwood, Mississippi, USA
Occupation novelist
Writing period 1992—present
Influences

Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American writer who received critical acclaim for her two novels, The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002). Tartt was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend.

The daughter of Don and Taylor Tartt, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi but raised 32 miles away in Grenada, Mississippi. At age five, she wrote her first poem, and she first saw publication in a Mississippi literary review when she was 13 years old.

Enrolling in the University of Mississippi in 1981, she pledged to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma. Her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss Writer-in-Residence, admitted Tartt into his graduate short story course where, stated Hannah, she ranked higher than the graduate students. Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982. There she met Bennington students Bret Easton Ellis and Jill Eisenstadt.

Contents

[edit] The Secret History

Tartt began writing her first novel, The Secret History, during her second year at Bennington. She graduated from Bennington in 1986. After Ellis recommended her work to the literary agent Amanda Urban, The Secret History was published in 1992, overwhelming the 75,000 first printing to become a bestseller, later translated into 24 languages.

The Secret History is set at a fictional college that closely resembles Tartt's alma mater. The plot concerns a close-knit group of six students and their professor of classics, who embark upon a secretive plan to stage a bacchanal. The first-person narrative is flavored heavily by the differences within the group. These include: social class, privilege, intellect and sexual orientation. In a tone of quiet melancholy, the narrator reflects on a variety of circumstances that lead ultimately to a murder within the group.

The fact of the murder, the location and the perpetrators are revealed in the opening pages, usurping the familiar framework and accepted conventions of the murder mystery genre. Critic A.O. Scott labeled it "a murder mystery in reverse." [1] A core theme is the relation between education and morality and the ultimate dissociation between the two by various characters. Evocative language captures the setting and environment, intensifying the psychological interplay of the key figures -- the authoritative intellectual Henry, the enigmatic twins Camilla and Charles, the all-American boy Bunny, the sensitive Francis and the lower-class Richard, who narrates.

The book was wrapped in a transparent acetate book jacket, an innovative design by Barbara De Wilde and Chip Kidd. According to Kidd, "The following season acetate jackets sprang up in bookstores like mushrooms on a murdered tree." [2]

[edit] The Little Friend

The Little Friend, Tartt's second novel, also with a Chip Kidd jacket design, was published in October 2002. It is a mystery centered on a young girl living in the American South in the mid-20th Century. Her implicit anxieties about the long-unexplained death of her brother and the dynamics of her extended family are a strong focus, as are the contrasting lifestyles and customs of small town Southerners.

[edit] Recent events

A planned film adaptation of The Secret History has been announced. In 2002, it was reported that Tartt was working on a retelling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of novellas in which ancient myths are reimagined and rewritten by contemporary authors.[3]

In January 2008, Tartt revealed that she was halfway through work on her third novel and that it is not a thriller about a group of people trapped in an elevator, as had been reported in The Daily Telegraph. [4]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Novels

[edit] Short stories

  • “Tam-O'-Shanter.” The New Yorker April 19th 1993, p. 90.[5]
  • “A Christmas Pageant.” Harper’s 287.1723. December 1993, p. 45+.
  • “A Garter Snake.” GQ 65.5, May 1995, p. 89+.
  • “The Ambush.” The Guardian, June 25th, 2005.

[edit] Nonfiction

  • “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine.” Harper’s 286, July 1992, p. 60-66.
  • “Basketball Season.” 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 288, April 1994, p. 37-40.

[edit] Awards

[edit] References

  1. ^ Scott, A.O. "Harriet the Spy," New York Times, November 3, 2002.
  2. ^ Jacobs, Alexandra. "Kidd Keeps Knopf Cool, Wrapping Books Gorgeously" New York Observer, Nov. 6, 2005
  3. ^ Independent: "Whatever happened to Donna Tartt?"
  4. ^ IndianExpress.com :: ‘I’ll be miserable if I had to write things fast’
  5. ^ Tartt, Donna. "Fiction: Tam-O'-Shanter" (abstract), The New Yorker, 1993-04-19. Retrieved on 2008-01-14. 
  6. ^ The Little Friend (Reference for both awards)

[edit] Sources

[edit] Listen to

[edit] External links

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