Donna Tartt
2 books analyzed
Biography
Donna Tartt (born 1963, Greenwood, Mississippi) is one of American literature's most deliberately unhurried novelists — she has published three novels in thirty years. The Goldfinch took eleven years to write after The Little Friend (2002). She studied classics and literature at Bennington College and University of Mississippi. She is known for her research depth — she spent years studying Dutch Golden Age painting, furniture restoration, and antique dealing before writing a word of The Goldfinch. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014 and sold over one million copies in its first year.
Donna Tartt at a glance
Works
The Goldfinch
2013 · 771 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
A stolen masterpiece, a dead mother, and the question no one can answer: can beauty save a life that has no reason to be saved?
The Secret History
1992 · 559 pages · ★★★☆☆ Challenging
A novel that tells you the murder on the first page — and then makes you complicit in it.
Diction Across Works
formal-lyrical with vernacular shifts
formal-classical