Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963) is an American novelist and essayist. Her work has been widely critically-acclaimed, and her novel The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been adapted into a film. Early life Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, the elder of two daughters. She was raised in the nearby town of Grenada. Her father, Don Tartt, was a rockabilly musician, turned freeway "service station owner-cum-local politician", while her mother, Taylor, was a secretary. Her parents were avid readers, and her mother would read while driving. I know a ton of poetry by heart, When I was a little kid, first thing I memorized were really long poems by A. A. Milne ... I also know all these things that I was made to learn. I'm sort of this horrible repository of doggerel verse. In 1968, aged five, Tartt wrote her first poem. In 1976, aged thirteen, Tartt was published for the first time when a sonnet was included in The Mississippi Review. In high school, Tartt was a freshman cheerleader for the basketball team and worked in the public library. In 1981, Tartt enrolled in the University of Mississippi where her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was a freshman. Finding her in the Holiday Inn bar one evening, Morris said to her, "My name is Willie Morris, and I think you're a genius." Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary", said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. A literary star." In 1982, following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College. At Bennington, Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks, and also met Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt. Tartt graduated in 1986. Career Tartt's novels are The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013). Tartt published her first novel, The Secret History in 1992. The book was derived from her time at Bennington College. Amanda Urban was her agent and the novel became a critical and financial success. Vanity Fair called Tartt a precocious literary genius, as she was just 29 years old. In 2002, Tartt's novel The Little Friend was first published in Dutch, since her books sold more per capita in the Netherlands