Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 The Goldfinch Donna Louise Tartt (born December 23, 1963)[2] is an American novelist and essayist.

Her father, Don Tartt, was a rockabilly musician, turned freeway "service station owner-cum-local politician", while her mother, Taylor, was a secretary.

[6][11][12] Tartt's essays about patriotism and alcoholism won prizes,[5] and she also wrote "short stories about death" during this period.

[5] An editor at the paper gave one of her stories to prominent writer Willie Morris, who found Tartt at the Holiday Inn bar one evening and declared her "a genius.

"[9][13][14][15][16] Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the 18-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story.

At Bennington, Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks, and also met Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Jill Eisenstadt.

[36][37] Tartt is a convert to Catholicism and contributed an essay, "The spirit and writing in a secular world", to The Novel, Spirituality and Modern Culture (2000).

[44] In 2013, Tartt claimed that she was not a recluse while stressing the freedoms of shutting the door, closing the curtains, and not participating in the life of culture.