Donna Tartt

Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and grew up in Grenada, publishing poetry as a child before studying at Bennington College, where a tight circle including Bret Easton Ellis first read the manuscript that became The Secret History; she has published only four novels since, spaced roughly a decade apart.

The Goldfinch (2013) follows Theo Decker, who survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother by walking out with a small Dutch masterpiece hidden in his coat, the painting anchoring him, and implicating him, through a decade of foster care, addiction, and criminal drift across New York, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam; it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014.

Tartt has cited Dickens and Dostoevsky as her deepest influences, and The Goldfinch's sprawl and orphaned protagonist openly invoke both; she remains famously private and slow to publish, releasing new fiction only rarely.