Tartt, Donna

She has published only one novel to date, but Donna Tartt took the literary world by storm in 1992 when the publicity surrounding the release of The Secret History came close to overshadowing the novel itself, which depicts the murder of a student at a small college in Vermont by his fellow Greek classics classmates. The title of Tartt's novel also is a fair description of her own attitude toward press interviews. She was born in 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi, the elder of two daughters born to Don and Taylor Tartt, but she grew up in Grenada, Mississippi, on the eastern edge of the Delta. Details from her formative years are scant, but she appears to have been a precocious child with an early love for literature—she wrote her first poem at age five, published her first sonnet in a Mississippi literary review at thirteen. In the fall of 1981, she entered the University of Mississippi in Oxford as a freshman, where one of her stories caught the attention of Willie Morris, then a writer-in-resident at the university. 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." Upon Morris' recommendation, Barry Hannah (also a writer-in-resident at the university) admitted Tartt as a freshman into his graduate short story course where, Hannah says, she outperformed the graduate students. At the urging of Morris and others, Tartt transferred after her freshman year from Ole Miss to Bennington College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, where she made friends with novelists Bret Easton Ellis and Jill Eisenstadt. During her second year at Bennington, she began writing The Secret History. Tartt began showing her novel soon after she began writing it to Ellis, one of the two people to whom the novel is dedicated. It was through Ellis that Tartt and her as-yet-unfinished novel were introduced to literary agent Amanda Urban, who accepted Tartt as an unsigned client. Two years later, Urban was able to stir up a bidding war among publishers for the 866-page manuscript; the winner was Knopf, who paid a massive $450,000 for the book and ordered a 75,000-copy first-printing (compared to about 10,000 copies that most first novels get). Even so, demand for the book was so tremendous that Knopf had to order unprecedented additional printings. The novel remained on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for thirteen weeks, reaching as high as number two.