Richard Papen is the first-person narrator of The Secret History. Although the novel’s action follows a year of Richard’s life, detailing his experiences an undergraduate student in a small classics program at Hampden College, he narrates from the perspective of an adult man looking back years later.

Richard grows up in Plano, a dull, small town in inland California. He feels distanced from his working-class father, who is verbally (and at time physically) abusive toward him and his mother. He initially studies at a local college with the aim of becoming a medical student but finds that he has no aptitude for the subject. His Greek class is the only class that he enjoys, for it nourishes his appreciation of beauty. Richard later reflects that this “longing for the picturesque” stirred by his Greek studies is his “fatal flaw” (7), for it leads him to seek a new academic lifestyle on the more rarified campus of Hampden College.

His “longing for the picturesque” is gratified when he is accepted to Hampden College in Vermont and granted substantial financial aid. Once on campus, he attempts to enroll in Greek, only to be told that the classics professor—an eccentric, wealthy man named Julian Morrow—maintains a very small, exclusive body of students, whom he admits based on personal bias.