The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s first book, has been in print for thirty years and is still captivating new readers, according to Clare Thorp.
There wasn’t much of an audience in mind for Donna Tartt’s first book, The Secret History, which she wrote over the course of eight years. A melancholy story of a group of classics students at a prestigious New England university who share a dreadful secret is described in Dickensian detail in this book that is both inspired by and about a love of Greek mythology. “I simply believed that I was producing an outmoded, really odd book that was only suitable for my own tastes. In an interview from 2018, Tartt stated, “I was writing it for me and my friends. Thirty years and millions of readers later, discovering The Secret History still seems like joining an exclusive club. I envy those who haven’t read that book yet because, in Petrou’s words, “to experience that book for the first time is to see someone at the greatest in their trade.”
