Books Mentioned in The Secret History by Donna Tartt

“When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favourite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.”

– Richard on insomnia and The Great Gatsby

Books Mentioned in The Secret History

• Poetics by Aristotle
• Agamemnon by Aeschylus
• Inferno by Dante
• The Iliad by Homer
• The Bacchae by Euripedes
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
• The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• The Final Problem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (alongside other mentions of Sherlock Holmes)
• Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• The Greeks and the Irrational by E.R. Dodds
• The Republic by Plato
• The Aeneid by Virgil
• The Superman comic
• The Upanishads
• “With Rue My Heart is Laden” by A.E. Housman
• “Lycidas” by John Milton
• “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Lord Alfred Tennyson
• “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae
• The New Testament
• Anthony Janson’s History of Art
• “Why so pale and wan fond lover?” by Sir John Suckling
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson
• The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur (now attributed to Thomas Middleton)
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• Terence – Andria (“Hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears)
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”

– A random quotation from Crime and Punishment, without citation, in The Secret History