The Secret History
SynopsisPlot
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
Story
About this book
Richard Papen, a nineteen-year-old from California, arrives at the small, fictional Hampden College in New England and is drawn into an exclusive circle of five Greek students. The group studies under a charismatic classics professor who teaches only a handful of pupils, keeping them apart from the wider campus. Papen finds himself absorbed by their world of ancient languages, philosophical intensity, and social insularity.
The novel opens by revealing that the group has committed a murder, then moves backward and forward to show how a set of intelligent, privileged young people came to cross that line. Their shared obsession with classical Greek ideals of transcendence pulls them away from ordinary college life and gradually from conventional moral boundaries. The tension in the book comes not from whether the act occurred but from the pressures, loyalties, and fractures that follow it.
Donna Tartt published The Secret History in 1992 as her debut novel. It is set during the late 1980s in a rural Vermont-like landscape, and much of its atmosphere depends on the contrast between the closed, ritualistic life of the Greek students and the mundane routines of the campus around them.
