On a crisp October morning, students in David Ring’s advanced English "The Secret History: Exploring Donna Tartt’s Masterpiece" class packed into school vans bound for southern Vermont. Their destination: Bennington College — a small liberal arts school nestled in the Green Mountains and the real-life inspiration for Hampden College, the fictional university in Donna Tartt’s acclaimed novel The Secret History.

Tartt’s The Secret History is a dark, psychological novel that follows a group of classics students at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont whose fascination with ancient Greek ideals of beauty and transcendence leads them to commit murder. Told through the eyes of an outsider drawn into their insular circle, the story unravels as guilt, secrecy, and obsession corrode their intellectual camaraderie. The idyllic college setting heightens the sense of isolation and moral decay, serving as the perfect backdrop for Tartt’s exploration of how the pursuit of knowledge, beauty, and belonging can blur the boundaries between brilliance and destruction.

Bennington has long been a hub for artists, writers, scientists, and thinkers. Its alumni include actress Holland Taylor, author Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho, and former First Lady Betty Ford. Author Donna Tartt also studied at Bennington in the 1980s and drew directly from her experiences to craft the haunting, atmospheric world of The Secret History, a book that helped define the dark academia genre.

“The setting is compelling; almost like an additional character of the novel,” says Ring. “It’s integral to the tone, the mystery, and the psychology of the story.”

Ring knew that the best way for his students to grasp that connection was to experience the Bennington campus firsthand. During their visit, they took a guided admissions tour, ate lunch in the dining hall, explored the campus on their own, and visited the Robert Frost Stone House Museum nearby — a stop that further connected the trip to the broader world of literature.

“It was really interesting to visit the school and compare it to what I imagined it to be while reading the book,” said Yige Yuan ’27. “Now, as I continue to read the book after visiting Bennington College, I can really picture the characters sprawled on the Commons Lawn.”

As they explored, students noticed details that echoed Tartt’s descriptions — from the Gothic architecture and its hidden passageways to the quiet, intellectual intensity of the campus itself. 

For Ring, that sense of immersion is precisely the point. “There’s simply no substitute for an immersive experience,” he explains. “You can read about a place or watch a video, but until you’re there — engaging with it in a tangible, tactile, sometimes uncomfortable way — you can’t truly understand or appreciate it.”

Experiential education is at the heart of Pomfret’s approach to learning. Trips like this one take ideas off the page and into the real world, inviting students to see literature not just as words but as lived experience — a way to connect imagination with reality.

“There was a time when the only way to experience the world was to step into it. And I think we’ve lost some of that instinct with the evolution of and dependence on technology,” says Ring. “This trip reminded us how valuable it is to see, feel, and engage with the world directly.”

In walking the same paths that inspired Tartt’s fiction, students discovered what it truly means to step inside a story. Now that the class has returned to the Hilltop, their discussions continue — deeper now, colored by firsthand understanding. 

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