Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Secret History | 1992 |
| The Little Friend | 2002 |
| The Goldfinch | 2013 |
About Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt (born 23 December 1963) is an American novelist who has published three novels, roughly one a decade: “The Secret History” (1992), “The Little Friend” (2002) and “The Goldfinch” (2013). “The Goldfinch” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014.
Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. She was first published at thirteen, when a sonnet appeared in the Mississippi Review. In 1981 she enrolled at the University of Mississippi, where the writer Willie Morris read one of her stories and Barry Hannah admitted her to his graduate course on the short story at the age of eighteen. She transferred to Bennington College the following year, studied classics, and graduated in 1986 with a degree in philosophy. Her fellow students included Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem.
“The Secret History”, which took her eight years to write, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. It is set at Hampden College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, and narrated by Richard Papen, a transfer student from California who joins a close group of classics students. The book opens with the murder of one of them and then traces how it came about. The first printing was 75,000 copies, well above the norm for a debut, and the novel is credited with originating the “dark academia” genre.
“The Little Friend” is set in 1970s Mississippi. Its heroine, twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, sets out to find whoever was responsible for the unsolved death of her brother Robin. It won the WH Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
In “The Goldfinch”, Theo Decker survives a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother, and leaves with a painting by Carel Fabritius that shapes the rest of his life. As well as the Pulitzer, it won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A film directed by John Crowley, with Ansel Elgort as Theo, was released in 2019. In an interview released in November 2023, Tartt confirmed that she was working on her next novel.