He wants to befriend them, to sleep with them, to live with them, to do everything he can to become them. He arrives at his preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then part of the mysterious and selective classics program, a cultlike group of trust fund babies led by an often-overstepping and charismatic professor.Ĭoming from a poor and abusive background, where beauty is nowhere to be found, Richard wants nothing more than to immerse and lose himself in this group of wealthy and charming students. His values are more ideas than ideals - vague and dim reflections of what love, and beauty, and wisdom, concepts he's never known, might feel or look like, rather than what they are. Richard is unhappy, impressionable, desperate. The Secret History follows mainly our narrator, Richard, as he looks back on his time in the classics program of a liberal arts college. I wrote about it vaguely and glowingly, thinking everyone had sort of.gotten the point of the book, already.īut then I read this review in Gawker, so I'm coming back. I said I "loved" its characters, though of course I meant more that I loved them as figures, considering they are unlikable murderers. In my first foray at writing about this (which you can still see below), I focused on the immersion of it. However, there are things that I believe no one should say emerging in real time, and so contributing my likely already-expressed thoughts might counterbalance them, to some degree. My original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been said. She divides her time between Virginia and New York City.
At Bennington she studied classics with Claude Fredericks. Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982, where she was friends with fellow students Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem. 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. Her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. At age five, she wrote her first poem, and she first saw publication in a Mississippi literary review at age 13.Įnrolling in the University of Mississippi in 1981, she pledged to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma. The daughter of Don and Taylor Tartt, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi but raised 32 miles away in Grenada, Mississippi. Her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Tartt was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend. Donna Tartt is an American writer who received critical acclaim for her first two novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend, which have been translated into thirty languages.
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