(Photo Credit: Little, Brown and Company/Beowulf Sheehan) NAME: Donna Tartt AGE: 50 OCCUPATION: Author/Novelist WHO SHE IS: With just three novels published during her nearly three-decade career, Donna Tartt might be seen as an avatar for Slow Writing. Fortunately, each of those books has been worth the long wait. The Secret History (1992) was a huge bestseller; The Little Friend (2002) won two awards (the WH Smith Literary Award and the 2003 Orange Prize for Fiction), and The Goldfinch (2013) has garnered immense praise both critical and collegial (including a thumbs up from Stephen King!). Donna began writing at the University of Mississippi, where her talent came to the fore and she transferred to Bennington College in Vermont, studying alongside other literary lights like Jonathan Lethem and Brett Easton Ellis (with whom she was briefly romantically involved). She is retiring but not reclusive, and has told the New York Times that she “keeps distractions at a minimum,” using the Internet usually “to find a restaurant address.” It is, without a doubt, this kind of focus that makes Tartt’s brilliant fiction so incandescent that, …