Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt
Born (1963-12-23) December 23, 1963
Greenwood, Mississippi
Occupation Fiction writer
Nationality American
Period 1992–present
Literary movement Neo-romanticism
Notable works The Secret History (1992)
The Little Friend (2002)
The Goldfinch (2013)
Notable awards WH Smith Literary Award (2003)
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2014)
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction (2014)

Donna Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American writer, the author of the novels The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013).[1] 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 the list of the "100 Most Influential People" compiled by Time magazine in 2014.[2]

Life and career

Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada.

She enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981, and her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. 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."[3] Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982, where she was friends with fellow students Bret Easton Ellis, Jill Eisenstadt, and Jonathan Lethem. At Bennington she studied classics with Claude Fredericks. She dated Ellis for a while after they shared their works in progress, The Secret History and Less Than Zero, respectively.[4]

In 2002, Tartt was reportedly working on a retelling of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus for the Canongate Myth Series, a series of novellas in which ancient myths are re-imagined and re-written by contemporary authors.[5] In 2006, Tartt's short story "The Ambush" was included in the Best American Short Stories 2006.

Tartt is Roman Catholic.[6]

Style and literary themes

Tartt has largely written in neo-romanticism-inflected prose that borrows heavily from the stylings of 19th century literature. This prose style is uncommon in contemporary American literary fiction, particularly with the tendency of fiction writers and literary critics to favor a briefer, more to-the-point prose style. Her prose style stands in stark contrast to that of her former classmate Bret Easton Ellis, whose novel Less Than Zero incorporates a similar setting and has some overlap in character types and themes but is written in a curt, minimalist style.

A number of recurring literary themes occur in Tartt's novels, including those related to social class and social stratification, guilt, and aesthetic beauty.

Awards

Bibliography

Novels
Short stories
Nonfiction
Audiobooks

References

Sources

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/22/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.