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 has described herself as, "this sort of 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]
Her 2013 novel The Goldfinch was a bestseller and received the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, though some critics felt the novel was juvenile and not literary.[21][34][35] The book was adapted into the movie The Goldfinch, which was a critical and commercial failure.[36][37] 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.[38]
In November 2023, The Queen's Reading Room released an interview with Donna Tartt who confirmed that she was working on her next novel.[39]
Personal life
In 2002, it was reported that Tartt had lived in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side,[40] and on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia.[41] Tartt is 5 feet (1.5m) tall.[42] She has also stated that she would never get married.[43] In a 2013 interview with The Irish Independent, Tartt stated that she dislikes going on book tours and giving talks, because she finds them mentally exhausting. She stressed that she was not a recluse but rather was maintaining her privacy, and asked rhetorically, "Was it Emerson who talked about the great freedom of American life as the freedom not to participate in the life of the culture, the freedom to shut the door, to close the curtains?"[22]
In 2016, Tartt's cousin, police officer James Lee Tartt, was killed while on duty.[44]
As of 2016, Virginia Living published that Tartt lived with art gallery owner Neal Guma in Charlottesville, Virginia, on a property they purchased together in 1997.[45] Tartt also dedicated her second novel to someone named Neal, although she did not elaborate on his identity.
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), edited by Paul Fiddes. 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."[46] 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."[46][5]
"Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine", Harper's Magazine 285.1706, July 1992, pp.60–66
Tartt's great-grandfather gave the five-year-old, for tonsillitis, whiskey, and codeine cough syrup, for two years, when kept home due to tonsillitis, she would read and write poetry.[53]
"Basketball Season" in 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 Magazine 288.1727, April 1994, pp.37–40
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