Writer of detective fiction, born in Fort Worth, Texas, USA. She studied at Barnard College and Columbia University, New York City. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1949), became famous as a source of Hitchcock's 1951 film of that name, but her best novels are generally held to be those describing the criminal adventures of her psychotic hero, Tom Ripley, beginning with The Talented Mr Ripley (1956, filmed 1999). Other titles included Ripley Under Ground (1971), Found in the Street (1986), and Ripley Under Water (1991).
Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 - February 4, 1995) was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers.
Early life
Born Mary Patricia Plangman just outside Fort Worth, Texas, she was raised first by her maternal grandmother and later by her mother and stepfather, who were both commercial artists.
Highsmith's mother Mary divorced her father five months before her birth. Highsmith never resolved this love-hate relationship, which haunted her for the rest of her life, and which she fictionalized in her short story "The Terrapin", in which a young boy stabs his mother to death.
Highsmith's grandmother taught her to read at an early age and Patricia made good use of the extensive library of her mother and stepfather. At the age of eight, she discovered Karl Menninger's The Human Mind and was fascinated by the case studies of patients afflicted with mental disorders such as pyromania and schizophrenia.
In 1942, Highsmith graduated from Barnard College, where she studied English composition, playwriting and the short story.
At the suggestion of Truman Capote, she rewrote her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at the Yaddo writer's colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. However, it was due to famed director Alfred Hitchcock and his 1951 film adaptation of the novel that Highsmith's career and reputation catapulted. Other filmmakers — primarily European — followed suit as several Highsmith novels, including The Blunderer (1954), This Sweet Sickness (1960), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and Ripley's Game (1974) were adapted for the silver screen.
She was a lifelong diarist, and developed her writing style as a child writing entries in which she fantasized that her neighbours had psychological problems and murderous personalities behind their facades of normality, a theme she would explore extensively in her novels.
Highsmith included homosexual overtones in many of her novels and addressed the theme directly in The Price of Salt and the posthumous Small g: a Summer Idyll. The Price is known for its happy ending, the first of its kind in homosexual/lesbian fiction. Highsmith found out her address from the credit card details, and on two occasions after the book was written (in June, 1950 and January, 1951) spied on the woman without the latter's knowledge.
Personal life
According to her biography, Beautiful Shadow, Highsmith's personal life was a troubled one;
Such reports are contradicted by others as well as by numerous published and unpublished photos that show the writer visibly enjoying social gatherings, and even clowning about with funny spectacles and masks.
Highsmith, who never married, had a number of lesbian affairs, and in 1949 she also became close to the novelist Marc Brandel. While noting that the story had "nothing to do with" the issue, she dedicated her novel People who Knock on the Door to "the courage of the Palestinian people and their leaders in the struggle to regain a part of their homeland".
Though her writing — 22 novels and 7 books of short stories — was highly acclaimed, especially outside of the United States, Highsmith preferred for her personal life to remain private.
Novels
The protagonists in Highsmith's novels defy the accepted model in detective fiction of the tough-talking and honest, but also physically brutal and misogynist hero, featured in the works of authors such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler;
Her recurring character Tom Ripley, an amoral, sexually ambiguous multiple murderer, was first introduced in 1955's The Talented Mr. Ripley. A later Ripley novel, Ripley's Game, inspired Wim Wenders' The American Friend (1977) and was filmed again in 2002 under its original title, starring John Malkovich and directed by Liliana Cavani. Ripley was featured in a total of five novels, known to fans as the Ripliad, written between 1955 and 1991.
Highsmith died of leukemia in 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland, aged 74. Her last novel, Small g: a Summer Idyll, was published posthumously a month later.
Bibliography
Novels
Strangers on a Train (1950) The Price of Salt (as Claire Morgan) (1953), also published as Carol The Blunderer (1954) The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) Deep Water (1957) A Game for the Living (1958) This Sweet Sickness (1960) The Two Faces of January (1961) The Cry of the Owl (1962) The Glass Cell (1964) A Suspension of Mercy (1965), also published as The Story-teller Those Who Walk Away (1967) The Tremor of Forgery (1969) Ripley Under Ground (1970) A Dog's Ransom (1972) Ripley's Game (1974) Edith's Diary (1977) The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980) People Who Knock on the Door (1983) Found in the Street (1987) Ripley Under Water (1991) Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995)Children's book of verse and drawings:
Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda (with Doris Sanders) (1958)Writing manual:
Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966)Story collections
Eleven (1970), also published as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories Little Tales of Misogyny (1974) The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder (1975) Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (1979) The Black House (1981) Mermaids on the Golf Course (1985) Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987)Short story collections put together by her publishers after her death:
Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories (2002) Man's Best Friend and Other Stories (2004)
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