Alumni News

Literary Brat Pack

Harper's Bazaar published a story on the Literary Brat Pack, featuring Bret Easton Ellis '86, Donna Tartt '86, and Jill Eisenstein '86, all of whom "helped change the course of American literature—and looked great doing it."

Brat Pack

The literary brat pack also included Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz. The group had a series of hit novels and subsequent movie adaptations from 1981-2002.

For Donna Tartt, however, fame brewed more slowly than for the others. Despite this, as the Bazaar article notes; "the brat pack's outlier found the longest lasting success." In a review of The Secret History, the New York Times praised her "supple, decorous prose" and her "complete assurance and skill as a writer." She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014 for her novel The Goldfinch.