The Secret History
Donna Tartt (1992)
“A novel that tells you the murder on the first page — and then makes you complicit in it.”
At a Glance
Richard Papen, a working-class California student, transfers to Hampden College in Vermont and worms his way into an exclusive Greek study group led by the charismatic professor Julian Morrow. The five students — Henry, Bunny, Francis, Charles, and Camilla — have already committed one murder (a Dionysian ritual killing of a Vermont farmer) before the novel begins. When Bunny discovers what they did and begins to crack under the weight of the secret, the group — Richard now included — murders him by pushing him off a cliff. The rest of the novel is the long, dissolving aftermath: guilt, paranoia, addiction, self-destruction, and the slow recognition that beauty without morality is just another form of corruption.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
The Secret History was the novel that invented dark academia as a literary genre, though the term wouldn't exist for another two decades. It proved that literary fiction could be a bestseller without compromising its complexity; that a novel structured around classical learning could find a mass audience; and that moral ambiguity — no redemption, no catharsis, no character who emerges better — could be commercially successful. It has sold over five million copies and maintains its cultural presence through successive waves of readers discovering it as undergraduates.
Diction Profile
High formal — long periodic sentences, Latinate vocabulary, classical allusion as social currency, occasional descent into the vernacular for comic or emotional effect
Very high