The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Summary
Richard Papen, a scholarship student from a flat, unglamorous California town, transfers to the small, wealthy Hampden College in Vermont and talks his way into an exclusive ancient Greek program limited to just six students, taught by the charismatic, secretive Julian Morrow. The other students, wealthy twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, aesthete Francis Abernathy, brilliant and controlling Henry Winter, and the group's crude hanger on Bunny Corcoran, draw Richard into the aftermath of something that happened without him: a bacchanal the group staged outside the curriculum that ended, in a genuine Dionysian frenzy, with them accidentally killing a local farmer. Bunny, plagued by guilt and increasingly reckless, begins hinting to outsiders about what happened and spending the others' money as if daring them to stop him, and Henry persuades the group, Richard now included, that Bunny has to die; Henry pushes him into a ravine while the others stand by, and they let it pass as a hiking accident. The book, narrated by Richard years later and opening with his flat announcement that he helped kill his friend, spends its second half on the group's unraveling, ending with Charles's decline into alcoholism and violence toward his own sister and, finally, Henry shooting himself in front of the others after a final confrontation in which Charles, drunk and armed, wounds Richard. Richard survives, permanently altered, mourning less Bunny than the version of himself and his friends that existed before the killing.
It begins as a campus novel steeped in Greek philology and old money glamour, seductive enough that readers often describe wanting to live inside Hampden's autumn, before tightening into a slow, dread laden inevitability once the murder is committed on page one and every later chapter works out how, not whether.
Historical Context & Significance
Alfred A. Knopf published The Secret History on September 16, 1992, with an unusually large first printing of seventy five thousand copies for a debut novelist, against roughly ten thousand copies typical for a first novel at the time. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times called it ferociously well paced entertainment that succeeds magnificently, while James Wood in the London Review of Books offered the era's sharpest dissent, writing that the story compels, but it doesn't involve. No literary prize considered the book.
Its afterlife has outpaced almost every prize winner from its own year. It is now widely credited with starting the dark academia aesthetic decades before the term existed, and three separate film adaptations, backed at different points by Alan J. Pakula, by Miramax with Gwyneth Paltrow attached, and by a television version with Melissa Rosenberg, have each collapsed at a different stage. The poor reception of the 2019 film of her later novel The Goldfinch is widely read as having made a screen version of this book less likely, leaving the novel's reputation resting entirely on the page it was written on.