Early life and education
Donna Louise Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, the elder of two daughters. She was raised in the nearby town of Grenada. Her father, Don Tartt, was a rockabilly musician, turned freeway "service station owner-cum-local politician", while her mother, Taylor, was a secretary. [5] [6] [7] Her parents were avid readers, and her mother would read while driving. [8] As a child, Tartt memorized "really long poems by A. A. Milne", and described herself as a "horrible repository of doggerel verse." [5]
Tartt wrote her first poem in 1968, when she was five years old. [9] She was first published at 13, when a sonnet was included in a 1976 edition of the Mississippi Review . [5] [10] In high school, she was a freshman cheerleader for the basketball team and worked in the public library. [6] [11] [12] Tartt's essays about patriotism and alcoholism won prizes, [5] and she also wrote "short stories about death" during this period. [5]
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 . [5] 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." [9] [13] [14] [15] [16] 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." [17]
In 1982, following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College. At Bennington, Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks, and also met Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt. [18] [2] Tartt graduated in 1986 with a degree in philosophy. [19] [20]
Career
The Secret History (1992) [21] [22] was derived from her time at Bennington College. [23] Amanda Urban was her agent and the novel became a critical and financial success. [24] [25] Vanity Fair called 29-year-old Tartt a precocious literary genius. [26]
Tartt's novel The Little Friend (2002) was first published in Dutch because her books sold more per capita in the Netherlands than elsewhere. [27] [28] [29] [30] [31]
In 2006, Tartt's short story "The Ambush" was included in the Best American Short Stories 2006. [32]
Her 2013 novel The Goldfinch was a bestseller and received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, though some critics felt that novel was juvenile and not literary. [26] [33] [34] The book was adapted into the movie The Goldfinch , which was a critical and commercial failure. [35] [36] 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. [37]
Tartt is a convert to Catholicism and contributed an essay, "The spirit and writing in a secular world", to The Novel, Spirituality and Modern Culture (2000). 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." [38] 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." [38] [5]
She has spent about ten years writing each of her novels. [26] [39] [40]
Personal life
In 2002, it was reported that Tartt had lived in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, [41] and on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. [42] Tartt is 5 feet (1.5 m) tall. [43] She has also stated that she would never get married. [44]
In 2013, Tartt claimed that she was not a recluse while stressing the freedoms of shutting the door, closing the curtains, and not participating in the life of culture. [39]
In 2016, Tartt's cousin, police officer James Lee Tartt, was killed while on duty. [45]
As of 2016, Virginia Living published that Tartt lived with art gallery owner Neal Guma. Both of them studied at Bennington. She and her partner purchased the Charlottesville property back in 1997. [46] Tartt also dedicated her second novel to someone named Neal, although she did not elaborate on his identity.
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