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    A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend"
    A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend"
    A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend"
    Ebook52 pages36 minutes

    A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Newsmakers for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Newsmakers for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535838016
    A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend"

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      A Study Guide for Donna Tartt's "The Little Friend" - Gale

      1

      The Little Friend

      Donna Tartt

      2002

      Introduction

      Fans and critics had been eagerly looking forward to The Little Friend (2002), Donna Tartt's second novel, since her literary debut—a decade earlier. After taking the literary world by storm with The Secret History (1992), Tartt spent ten years crafting her sophomore effort. The Little Friend is set in the fictional community of Alexandria, Mississippi, which is similar to the two communities in which the author lived as a child, Greenwood and Grenada, Mississippi.

      In The Little Friend, Tartt explores racial and social life in the South in the late 1970s through the filter of the murder of nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes, which occurred twelve years earlier. Robin's now twelve-year-old sister Harriet takes it upon herself to try and exact revenge on the man she believed murdered him, Danny Ratliff. Hely, who harbors a crush on Harriet, aids Harriet in her quest. Her difficult home life is also a significant focus as the family was devastated by the loss of Robin and never fully recovered. The girl's experiences makes The Little Friend very much a coming-of-age story.

      Like Tartt herself, intelligent, outcast Harriet loves reading books and is particularly influenced by classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Tartt admitted to Dennis Moore of USA Today, This book is really about other books that I loved in childhood. Critics often compared it to her first novel, The Secret History, and generally found The Little Friend to be a complex, well-crafted book. Writing in the Houston Chronicle, Earl L. Dachslager commented, Tartt's new novel is denser, more multilayered, than her first. More mature, one could say, and thus a bit heavier and slower, but for all that no less enjoyable and readable.

      Author Biography

      Donna Louise Tartt was born December 23, 1963, in Greenwood, Mississippi, the eldest of two daughters of Don Tartt, a politician, and Taylor, a secretary. She grew up in Grenada, Mississippi. Tartt started keeping a notebook at the age of four before writing her first poem at the age of five. When Tartt was thirteen years old, she published her first poem in a Mississippi literary journal. As a child, Tartt also loved to read, especially enjoying classic books such as Peter Pan and Treasure Island.

      In 1981, Tartt entered the University of Mississippi at Oxford. When she was a freshman at the university, the influential author-in-residence Willie Morris read her work and declared her a genius. Morris helped get Tartt admitted to a graduate writing class taught by Barry Hannah, though Tartt was only a freshman. Finding that the university did not meet her needs, Tartt transferred to Bennington College in Vermont as a sophomore. There, she became friends with Brett Easton Ellis, who went on to write Less Than Zero and American Psycho.

      While still a student at Bennington, Tartt began writing what became her first published novel, The Secret History. After graduating in 1986, she briefly attended art school and lived in New England. Tartt also continued to work on her novel, which took about eight years to complete. Along the way, Tartt's friendship with Ellis led to her signing with his literary agent, Amanda Urban. With Urban's help, Tartt received an advance of nearly half a million

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