Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi on December 23rd, 1963 to a family of lovers of literature, with her parents, Don and Taylor Tartt, especially being noted as avid readers who instilled that love onto their daughter. Tartt even recalls her mother, a secretary, reading while driving. She is also the oldest of two daughters, though not much information is known about her younger sister. She recalls growing up listening to elaborate stories told by her librarian aunts who she claims spoke in their own secret language. Tartt even went on to work in a library herself during her high school years. For Tartt, books and literature strengthened all of her familial relationships. She was an early lover of classical literature, including works by A.A Milne, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Oliver Twist were some of her favorite novels growing up, and she credits them for their influence on her writing. She is known to have published her first poem at age 13.

Tartt began her college education at the University of Mississippi in 1981, starting there at age 17, though she would only attend for one year. Her writings while at Ole Miss attracted the attention of writer Willie Morris and writer in residence Barry Hannah. The two encouraged her to transfer to Bennington College in 1982 to gain wider experience, a choice that deeply affected her writing. While at Bennington, she met many other writers, including Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt, and the college’s Vermont location inspired the wintry and mysterious tone of her first novel, The Secret History, which she began writing during her time there. She was only 19 years old when she began work on the novel. The small group of Classics students in her preeminent novel is reminiscent of the select class of students taught Greek Literature by Bennington professor Claude Fredericks, of which Tartt was a part of.

Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History, in 1992, roughly ten years after she began working on it. The novel is deeply inspired by Tartt’s experience at Bennington College. This book found itself on the New York Times Bestseller list for 13 straight weeks. It has also been translated into two dozen languages. It is known that Tartt connects and relates most with her very first narrator, Richard, from The Secret History, showing that this first novel was especially impactful for her. Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, would be released in 2002, starting Tartt’s trend of publishing a new novel every decade, though she has yet to release any new works in the 2020’s. The Little Friend takes place in a small Mississippi town reminiscent of the town in which she grew up. Tartt’s third and most recent novel, The Goldfinch, was released in 2013 after 20 years of writing and was a quick success, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, as well as the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. A film adaptation was released in 2019, though Tartt was not involved in the writing of the screenplay or in the producing of the film in any way.

Tartt lives a quiet life with her pug, Pongo, in Charlottesville, Virginia on a small farm owned by both herself and art gallery owner Neal Guma. However, Tartt herself remained largely a mystery. She keeps her appearance refined, and very rarely allows personal interviews. She is known for avoiding interviews and answering questions about her personal life, because she believes that sharing too much about herself would detract attention from her novels. She finds doing too many interviews to be actively harmful to the integrity of an author’s works. She does, however, enjoy doing public readings of her works. She has never been married, and denies any romantic relationships, although it has been speculated that she and Bret Easton Ellis may have been romantically involved due to her dedicating The Secret History to him. She also dedicated her second novel to a “Neal,” though his identity was never elaborated on. She exclusively write books that she likes, not caring about criticisms her readers give or what they want to see next, showing that writing is a personal passion. Tartt loves to travel to the locations where her books will be set, even spending weeks in an Amsterdam hotel room to get into the head space of the narrator of her third novel, Theodore Decker. She takes her time while writing, regularly taking a decade or more to finish writing one novel, with all of her works being 500 pages or more. It is alleged that she is currently writing a fourth novel, as well as a short story about the Greek mythological character Daedalus.