De Amerikaans schrijfster Donna Tartt werd geboren in Greenwood, Mississippi, op 23 december 1963. Tartt studeerde samen met onder anderen auteur Brett Easton Ellis klassieke talen en filosofie aan het Bennington College in Bennington (Vermont). In 1992 debuteerde ze met de roman “The Secret History” (“De verborgen geschiedenis”), over 6 studenten klassieke talen, die op zoek gaan naar de vervoering, die door Euripides beschreven werd in zijn toneel ‘Bakchai’. Hierin wordt meermaals verwezen naar de roes die de maenaden, de vrouwelijke volgelingen van Dionysos, bereiken en waarin ze dieren verscheuren, geslachtsgemeenschap hebben en dergelijke meer in een uitzinni ge staat van bewustzijn. Dit boek leverde Tartt veel lovende kritieken op en de verwachtingen stonden hoog gespannen voor haar tweede boek. Dit verscheen in 2002, “The Little Friend” (“De Kleine Vriend”). In 2004 verscheen een kort verhaal, “Sleepytown: A Southern Gothic Childhood, with Codeine” (“Het Land Van De Papaver”). De in 2013 verschenen roman “Het puttertje” kreeg de wereldpremière in de Nederlandse vertaling. Een tweede Nederlands element van de roman is dat het schilderij “Het puttertje“van Carel Fabritius er een rol in speelt en is afgebeeld op de omslag.

Uit: The Little Friend

“For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it. Dissatisfaction had been expressed by the elder Cleves at the new arrangement; and while this mainly had to do with suspicion of innovation, on principle, Charlotte felt that she should have paid attention to the undercurrent of grumbling, that it had been a slight but ominous warning of what was to come; a warning which, though obscure even in hindsight, was perhaps as good as any we can ever hope to receive in this life.
Though the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history–repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire death-bed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before–the events of this terrible Mother’s Day were never discussed. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruelest and most random disasters–the death, by fire, of one of Charlotte’s infant cousins; the hunting accident in which Charlotte’s uncle had died while she was still in grammar school–were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song; a song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth”

 
Donna Tartt (Greenwood, 23 december 1963)