The Secret History
Donna Tartt (1992)
“A novel that tells you the murder on the first page — and then makes you complicit in it.”
Short Summary
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.
Detailed Summary
Richard Papen grows up poor in Plano, California — a town he hates, a life he wants to escape. He engineers a transfer to Hampden College in Vermont, a small liberal arts school, and is drawn to an elite Greek class taught by Julian Morrow, an aesthete who accepts only five students and shapes them ...