She rarely gives interviews, doesn’t have social media and divides her time living in semi-reclusion between New York (she always stays at the Soho Grand Hotel) and the Virginia home she calls her “dacha.” Moreover, Tartt has only published two other books, The Little Friend (2002) and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014. In the 30 years since the book’s release, the author has managed to maintain her air of mystery. Tartt’s Mississippi roots permitted her association with Southern authors like Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and Truman Capote.īut in reality, Tartt’s parents raised her in a far more prosaic environment than she implied for decades her mother was a secretary, and her father, a grocer who rose to prominence in local politics. Tartt had the aura of a fabulous tale, proving that the stereotype of Southern gentility and old money is not entirely, if at all, true. She dressed like a diminutive androgynous gentleman, wearing Oxford shoes, vests and ties, and her hair was coiffed into a perfect bob (no writer has self-branded any better since Tom Wolfe). That is, she weighs 90 pounds and is five feet tall. “I have the same measurements as Lolita,” she told a journalist. In the literary world, it was widely known that Tartt received a $450,000 advance (nothing excites the book market like a large figure), but Tartt contributed to the hoopla by crafting an irresistible image of herself. Suddenly, everyone was reading the 550-page novel about six Classics students at an imaginary university, Hampden College, who are involved in a murder. Before her book The Secret History was published in the fall of 1992, the 28-year-old author’s debut novel had generated so much buzz that by the time it hit bookstores, it was a major publishing event.

You can’t say that success caught Donna Tartt by surprise.

The secret history richard papen