Donna Tartt (born 23 December 1963) is an American novelist.

Biography

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Daughter of Don and Taylor Tartt, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi but raised in Grenada, Mississippi. She started attending the University of Mississippi in 1981, where she pledged to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma as a freshman, before transferring to Bennington College in 1982. There she met writer Bret Easton Ellis who was also a student there. She graduated from Bennington in 1986.

Tartt began writing her first novel The Secret History during her second year at Bennington. It was Ellis who recommended her work to the well-known literary agent Amanda Urban, thus paving the way for the novel's success. It was published in 1992 to great demand, even overwhelming a 75,000 book order for the first printing and becoming a bestseller.

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