Donna Tartt

Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been widely critically-acclaimed, and her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been adapted into a film. 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. Her parents were avid readers, and her mother would read while driving.

I know a ton of poetry by heart; when I was a little kid, the first thing I memorized were really long poems by A. A. Milne ... I also know all these things that I was made to learn. I'm sort of this horrible repository of doggerel verse. In 1968, aged five, Tartt wrote her first poem. In 1976, aged thirteen, Tartt was published for the first time when a sonnet was included in The Mississippi Review. In high school, Tartt was a freshman cheerleader for the basketball team and worked in the public library.

In 1981, Tartt enrolled in the University of Mississippi, where her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. 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." Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary," said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. A literary star."

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. Tartt graduated in 1986. Tartt's novels are The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History, in 1992. The book was derived from her time at Bennington College. Amanda Urban was her agent, and the novel became a critical and financial success. Vanity Fair called Tartt a precocious literary genius, as she was just 29 years old.

In 2002, Tartt's novel The Little Friend was first published in Dutch since her books sold more per capita in the Netherlands than elsewhere. In 2006, Tartt's short story "The Ambush" was included in the Best American Short Stories 2006. Her 2013 novel The Goldfinch stirred reviewers as to whether it was a literary novel, a controversy possibly based on its best-selling status. The book was adapted for the movie The Goldfinch. Tartt was reportedly paid $3m for the movie rights but parted company with her long-standing agent, Amanda Urban, over the latter's failure to secure Tartt a role in the screenplay writing or wider production. The movie was a critical and commercial failure.

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, Tartt wrote that "faith is vital in the process of doing my work and in the reasons I am driven to make it." 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."

She has spent about ten years writing each of her novels. Tartt won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Little Friend in 2003 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Goldfinch in 2014. She was included in Time magazine's 2014 "100 Most Influential People" list.

In 2002, it was reported that Tartt had lived in Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, and on a farm near Charlottesville, Virginia; that she was 5 feet (1.5 m) tall, and that she had said she would never get married. In 2013, she 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 the culture. In 2016, Tartt's cousin, police officer James Lee Tartt, was killed while on duty.

As of 2016, Virginia Living published that Donna 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. Donna Tartt also dedicates her second novel to someone named Neal, although she does not elaborate on his identity.