10 Intriguing Insights into Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History'

When Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, hit the shelves in 1992, it instantly captivated readers and critics alike, quickly becoming a modern classic. As Entertainment Weekly aptly put it, ‘Book publishers, moviemakers, and glossy magazines have already descended upon Tartt in the form of a shower of gold, but don’t be misled by the glitter and clatter. This is actually a good, even profound novel.’ To date, it has sold over 5 million copies worldwide.

The story of The Secret History is narrated by Richard Papen, a California native from a modest background who transfers to a prestigious Vermont college. There, he becomes entangled with a mysterious group of classics students, drawn into a world full of secret rituals, suspense, and even murder. In celebration of its 30th anniversary in September 2022, here are 10 essential things you should know about The Secret History.

1. The Secret History is widely regarded as a seminal work in the Dark Academia genre.

Dark Academia, a trendy and intellectual online subculture, embraces vintage academic aesthetics and themes. As The New York Times described it, it’s ‘a subculture with a heavy emphasis on reading, writing, learning—and a look best described as traditional-academic-with-a-gothic-edge; think slubby brown cardigans, vintage tweed pants, a worn leather satchel full of books, dark photos, brooding poetry, and skulls next to candles.’ With its haunting plot and scholarly ambiance, The Secret History perfectly captures the essence of this subculture, with The Times even dubbing it ‘Dark Academia’s essential text.’

2. The title of the novel is inspired by Procopius’s 6th-century account of the Byzantine emperor Justinian.

Originally, Tartt had titled her novel The God of Illusion, but she later changed it to The Secret History, a nod to Procopius's The Secret History of the Court of Justinian, which the LA Review of Books called ‘essentially a scorched-earth critique aimed at Emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora.’ Much like Procopius, Tartt exposes the dark truths hidden beneath the seemingly perfect exterior of her characters.

3. Tartt referred to her novel as a 'whydunit.'

The iconic opening line of The Secret History ('The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation') immediately signals to the reader that a death has occurred. By the second paragraph, the identities of Bunny’s killers are revealed, making it clear that the book isn't focused on ‘whodunit,’ but rather ‘whydunit.’ As Tartt explained in an interview with novelist Jill Eisenstadt, ‘It’s not a whodunit at all. It’s a whydunit.’

4. The Secret History made waves long before its official release.

The New York Times reported that there was a ‘heated auction’ for The Secret History, which sold to Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for a reported $450,000, with an additional $500,000 for the paperback rights (sold separately) in 1991. This was followed by an aggressive promotional campaign, including a 15-city reading tour and interviews with Tartt in major magazines like Esquire, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Elle. Some speculated that the book had been overhyped before it even reached readers. Gary Fisketjon, the book’s editor, told the Times, ‘If the book’s not that great, you figure the publicity is good because the book’s probably not going to get anywhere on its own, and at least the publicity brings it some notice. And when you really know you’ve got a great book, like Donna’s, it will pay off for people after they pick it up.’

Today, Tartt is known for her minimal public appearances and leads a reclusive life between her books. As she told The Independent in 2013 regarding book festivals, ‘They’re just distracting. It’s better for me to be at home and getting on with my work than standing up and talking about a book. It’s very counterproductive. I’d go mad if I had to go on a book tour every two years. I’d go completely berserk. I can just about handle it once every decade.’

5. Tartt has firmly denied that any aspects of The Secret History are inspired by her own college experiences or people she knew at her alma mater.

Tartt graduated from Bennington College in 1986. Like the fictional Hampden College in The Secret History, Bennington is a small, renowned liberal arts college in Vermont. However, Tartt has insisted that she did not draw inspiration from her alma mater when creating The Secret History. ‘Hampden is not Bennington,’ she told James Kaplan in a 1992 interview with Vanity Fair.

Several of Tartt’s former classmates, however, beg to differ. In an oral history published by Esquire in 2019, Todd O’Neill, a Bennington classmate who believes he inspired the character of Henry due to striking similarities between himself and the character at the time, said, ‘The Secret History isn’t so much a work of fiction as it is a thinly veiled reality—a roman à clef.’ Another former classmate, Matt Jacobsen, claims he was the inspiration for Bunny: ‘I wore wire-rimmed glasses like Bunny. I had dyslexia… like Bunny. And, like Bunny, I was an extremely affected young man.’ His mother even remarked after reading the novel, ‘That’s you all right.’

Numerous people also suggested that the charismatic Bennington classics professor Claude Fredericks inspired the character of Julian Morrow, Hampden’s equally captivating classics professor. Tartt denied this claim in 2021, stating, ‘In public, and whenever I’ve been asked about it throughout my career, I’ve denied that the character of Julian Morrow is based on the Claude Fredericks I knew and loved—except in the most superficial respects.’

6. The novel was mentioned in a book released five years prior to the publication of The Secret History.

While they were both at Bennington College, author Bret Easton Ellis, who was a classmate of Tartt, read early drafts of her novel. He admitted to including subtle references to The Secret History in his 1987 book, The Rules of Attraction, saying to Esquire, ‘I put Easter egg references to The Secret History in The Rules of Attraction … because I thought it would be funny, an inside joke.’

The most obvious references appear in two lines. The first is on page 160: ‘that weird Classics group (and they’re probably roaming the countryside sacrificing farmers and performing pagan rituals).’ The second is on page 226: ‘that weird group of Classics majors, standing by looking like undertakers.’

Tartt also dedicated The Secret History to Ellis (who speculated it was because he ‘shaved off a couple years of it moving through the system’ by showing the manuscript to an agent, who then got it to the publisher), along with Paul Edward McGloin, whom Tartt described as ‘muse and Maecenas’ and ‘the dearest friend I will ever have in this world.’

7. It took Tartt a full eight years to complete the novel. 

Tartt began working on The Secret History during her time at Bennington and continued to develop it for years after graduation. ‘I can't write quickly,’ she once remarked. ‘The Secret History took eight years. If I could write a book a year and keep up the same quality, I’d be happy, but I don’t think I’d have any fans.’

8. The likelihood of a film adaptation of The Secret History ever being made seems slim.

Prior to The Secret History’s release, Alan J. Pakula acquired the movie rights and planned to produce a film, with Scott Hicks set to direct. The script was worked on by writers like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (whose daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, attended Bennington alongside Tartt). However, the project faltered—The Hollywood Reporter stated that ‘Pakula was never satisfied with the script and then passed away in a 1998 car crash.’

When Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend, was published in 2002 to critical acclaim, discussions about a The Secret History film adaptation reignited. Gwyneth Paltrow and her brother Jake were initially involved as producers and directors, respectively. However, after their father Bruce Paltrow’s death that same year, they abandoned the project. Later, Ellis and producer Melissa Rosenberg, who also attended Bennington with Tartt and Ellis, tried to adapt the book into a miniseries, but the project never materialized.

When her 2013 novel The Goldfinch was released, Tartt expressed some hesitation about it, telling Town & Country, ‘Once the book is out there, it’s not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn’t any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging.’ She was reportedly dissatisfied with the deal for the resulting film. The rights to The Secret History have reverted back to Tartt, and according to some sources, she does not intend to sell them again.

9. A well-known TV series paid tribute to the novel.

Although a true adaptation of The Secret History may never come to pass, that hasn’t stopped people from honoring it. One of the most obvious tributes appeared in the television show Riverdale. In season four of the CW series, which is based on the Archie comics, Jughead (played by Cole Sprouse), a working-class character, receives an offer to attend an elite boarding school that strongly resembles Hampden College. At this school, Jughead joins a writing group similar to the Greek group in The Secret History. Some members of this group also belong to a more secretive (and lethal) society, reminiscent of the exclusive bacchanal that only some members of the study group are invited to in The Secret History. The murderous group in Riverdale has members named Bret Weston Wallis and Donna Sweett, which are clear references to Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. In the season’s second episode, Veronica is seen reading a copy of the novel.

10. Some speculate that The Secret History inspired a real-life crime.

On October 1, 1997, Luke Woodman, a 16-year-old student from Pearl High School in Pearl, Mississippi, murdered his mother before heading to school and opening fire, killing two students and injuring seven others. Later, six of Woodman’s friends were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit murder, as reported by The New York Times.

Woodman and his friends referred to themselves as ‘the Group’ (some sources indicate they called themselves ‘the Kroth’); many of them were also interested in philosophy and part of the Junior Classical League, where they studied Latin. According to TIME, these details sparked rumors in Pearl that ‘the Group’ was inspired by The Secret History; a 1999 article in Detour magazine stated that Tartt never commented on the case.