Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta, and raised in the nearby town of Grenada. Her father, Don Tartt, was a successful local politician, while her mother, Taylor, was a secretary. At age thirteen, Tartt was published for the first time when a sonnet was included in a Mississippi literary review.\n', 'She enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981, where her writing caught the attention of Willie Morris while she was still a freshman. Following a recommendation from Morris, Barry Hannah, then an Ole Miss writer-in-residence, admitted the eighteen-year-old Tartt into his graduate course on the short story. "She was deeply literary," said Hannah. "Just a rare genius, really. A literary star."\n', 'Following the suggestion of Morris and others, she transferred to Bennington College in 1982. At Bennington she studied classics with Claude Fredericks. \n', '

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