Donna Tartt life and biography

Donna Tartt is an American writer and author of the novels The Secret History (1992) and The Little Friend (2002). She won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003.

Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History was published in 1992 after a flurry of publicity over the sizable advance she received -- nearly a million dollars, including foreign and paperback rights. The tale of college students entwined in murder, the novel was hailed by some as great literature and criticized by others as pretentious; it became a bestseller and an international success. Tartt, a native of Mississippi, began the novel in the 1980s, when she was still a student at Bennington College in Vermont. The success of The Secret History made her a book world celebrity and left readers anticipating her second novel, but Tartt was in no hurry. After ten years, during which she published essays, poems and short stories, she published The Little Friend, another popular and critical success.

Fellow Bennington student Bret Easton Ellis (author of Less Than Zero and American Psycho) helped her get her first novel published... Other writers who attended Bennington include Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn) and Jill Eisenstadt (From Rockaway).

Author of books:

Novels
The Secret History, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
The Little Friend, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Short stories
“Tam-O'-Shanter”. The New Yorker April 19th 1993, p. 90.
“A Christmas Pageant”. Harper’s 287.1723. December 1993, p. 45+.
“A Garter Snake”. GQ 65.5, May 1995, p. 89+.
“The Ambush”. The Guardian, June 25th, 2005.

Nonfiction
“Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine.” Harper’s 286, July 1992, p. 60-66.
“Basketball Season.” 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 288, April 1994, p. 37-40.

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