Buy The Secret HistoryIt begins with a murder. Not a whodunit, but a whydunit—a novel that opens with a confession and spends its nearly 600 pages unraveling the psychology of guilt, friendship, and aesthetic obsession. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, first published in 1992, is both a campus novel and something far more mythic: a chilling, erudite descent into the seductive dangers of intellectual isolation. Set at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont—a New England sanctuary of frostbitten stone buildings and academic pretension—the novel follows Richard Papen, a disaffected California transplant who becomes enmeshed with a small, elite group of students studying ancient…
Beauty, Terror, and the Classics: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
Tartt once described the novel as being about “people who know the right thing to do, and don’t do it.”
