Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt is an American novelist who publishes rarely but to enormous effect — The Secret History and The Goldfinch are two of the most discussed American novels of recent decades.

Donna Tartt was born in Mississippi and attended Bennington College, where she began what would become The Secret History. Published in 1992 to immediate commercial and critical success, The Secret History inverted the murder mystery: we know from the first page that a young man has been killed by his group of friends — the novel’s task is to understand why. Set in an exclusive New England college, it follows a group of classics students in the orbit of a charismatic professor and is simultaneously a suspenseful novel of ideas and a precise portrait of a particular kind of intellectual decadence. It remains one of the most influential campus novels ever written and helped establish the “dark academia” aesthetic.

The Goldfinch, published in 2013 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a considerably longer and more sprawling work — a bildungsroman following a boy who survives a terrorist attack at a New York museum and escapes with a small Dutch masterpiece. It takes in New York, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, and the New York antiques trade, and at its best demonstrates Tartt’s extraordinary gift for sensory specificity and the evocation of longing. James Wood’s notable attack on the novel in The New Yorker — arguing it was a superior middlebrow entertainment masquerading as literary fiction — sparked one of the decade’s more interesting critical debates, and reasonable readers continue to disagree.

Tartt takes a decade between books, and her three novels have each generated intense reader devotion. Whatever the literary verdict, she creates fictional worlds that readers find difficult to leave.