Patricia Highsmith
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories in a career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing was influenced by existentialist literature and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene.
Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and mostly raised in her infancy by her maternal grandmother, Highsmith was taken to New York City at the age of six to live with her mother and stepfather. After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, she worked as a writer for comic books while writing her own short stories and novels in her spare time. Her literary breakthrough came with the publication of her first novel Strangers on a Train which was adapted into a 1951 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was well received in the United States and Europe, cementing her reputation as a major writer of psychological thrillers.
In 1963, Highsmith moved to England where her critical reputation continued to grow. Following the breakdown of her relationship with a married Englishwoman, she moved to France in 1967 to try to rebuild her life. Her sales were now higher in Europe than in the United States which her agent attributed to her subversion of the conventions of American crime fiction. She moved to Switzerland in 1982 where she continued to publish new work that increasingly divided critics. The last years of her life were marked by ill health and she died of aplastic anemia and lung cancer in Switzerland in 1995.
The Times said of Highsmith: "she puts the suspense story in a toweringly high place in the hierarchy of fiction." Her second novel, The Price of Salt, published under a pseudonym in 1952, was ground breaking for its positive depiction of lesbian relationships and optimistic ending. She remains controversial for her antisemitic, racist, and misanthropic statements.
Early life
Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas on January 19, 1921. She was the only child of commercial artists Jay Bernard Plangman and Mary Plangman. Her father had not wanted a child and had persuaded her mother to have an abortion. Her mother, after a failed attempt to abort her by drinking turpentine, decided to leave Plangman. The couple divorced nine days before their daughter's birth.In 1927 Highsmith moved to New York City to live with her mother and her stepfather, commercial artist Stanley Highsmith, whom her mother had married in 1924. Patricia excelled at school and read widely, including works by Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and John Ruskin. At the age of nine, she became fascinated by the case histories of abnormal psychology in The Human Mind by Karl Menninger, a popularizer of Freudian analysis.
In the summer of 1933, Highsmith attended a girls' camp and the letters she wrote home were published as a story two years later in Woman's World magazine. She received $25 for the story. After returning from camp, she was sent to Fort Worth and lived with her maternal grandmother for a year. She called this the "saddest year" of her life and felt "abandoned" by her mother. In 1934 she returned to New York to live with her mother and stepfather in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. She was unhappy at home. She hated her stepfather and developed a life-long love–hate relationship with her mother, which she later fictionalized in stories such as "The Terrapin", about a young boy who stabs his mother to death.
She attended the all-girl Julia Richman High School where she achieved a B minus average grade. She continued to read widelyEdgar Allan Poe was a favoriteand began writing short stories and a journal. Her story "Primroses Are Pink" was published in the school literary magazine.
In 1938 Highsmith entered Barnard College where her studies included English literature, playwriting and short story composition. Fellow students considered her a loner who guarded her privacy but she formed a life-long friendship with fellow student Kate Kingsley Skattebol. She continued to read voraciously, kept diaries and notebooks, and developed an interest in eastern philosophy, Marx and Freud. She also read Thomas Wolfe, Marcel Proust and Julien Green with admiration. She published nine stories in the college literary magazine and became its editor in her senior year.
Apprentice writer
After graduating in 1942, Highsmith, despite endorsements from "highly placed professionals," applied without success for a job at publications such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker. She eventually found work with FFF Publishers which provided copy for various Jewish publications. The job, which paid $20 per week, lasted only six months but gave her experience in researching stories.In December 1942 Highsmith found employment with comic book publisher Sangor–Pines where she earned up to $50 per week. She wrote "Sergeant Bill King" stories, contributed to Black Terror and Fighting Yank comics, and wrote profiles such as Catherine the Great, Barney Ross, and Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker for the "Real Life Comics" series. After a year, she realized she could make more money and have more flexibility for travel and serious writing by working freelance for comics and she did so until 1949. From 1943 to 1946, under editor Vincent Fago at Timely Comics, she contributed to its U.S.A. Comics wartime series, writing scenarios for characters such as "Jap Buster Johnson" and The Destroyer. For Fawcett Publications she scripted characters including "Crisco and Jasper." She also wrote for True Comics, Captain Midnight and Western Comics. Working for comics was the only long-term job Highsmith ever held.
Highsmith considered comics boring "hack work" and was determined to become a novelist. In the evenings she wrote short stories which she submitted, unsuccessfully, to publications such as The New Yorker. In 1944 she spent five months in Mexico where she worked on an unfinished novel "The Click of the Shutting". On her return to Manhattan she worked on another unfinished novel "The Dove Descending".
The following year, "The Heroine," a story about a pyromaniac nanny that she had written in 1941, was published by Harper's Bazaar. The publishers Knopf wrote her that they were interested in publishing any novels she might have. Nothing, however, came from their subsequent meeting. Highsmith's agents advised her that her stories needed to be more "upbeat" to be marketable but she wanted to write stories that reflected her vision of the world.
In 1946, Highsmith read Albert Camus' The Stranger and was impressed by his absurdist vision. The following year she commenced writing Strangers on a Train, and her new agent submitted an early draft to a publisher's reader who recommended major revisions. Based on the recommendation of Truman Capote, Highsmith was accepted by the Yaddo artist's retreat during the summer of 1948, where she worked on the novel.
Strangers on a Train was accepted for publication by Harper & Brothers in May 1949. The following month, Highsmith sailed to Europe where she spent three months in England, France and Italy. In Italy, she visited Positano which would later become the major setting for her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. She read an anthology of Kierkegaard on the trip and declared him her new "master".
Established writer
Highsmith returned to New York in October 1949 and began writing The Price of Salt, a novel about a lesbian relationship. Strangers on a Train was published in March 1950 and received favorable reviews in The ''New Yorker, New York Herald Tribune and New York Times. The novel was shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Prize and Alfred Hitchcock secured the film rights for $6,000. Sales increased after the release of the film.In February 1951, she left for Europe for the publication of the novel in England and France. She stayed for two years, traveling and working on an unfinished novel, "The Traffic of Jacob's Ladder," which is now lost. She wrote Skattebol, "I can imagine living mostly in Europe the rest of my life."
Highsmith was back in New York in May 1953. The Price of Salt had been published in hardback under a pseudonym the previous May, and sold well in paperback in 1953. It was praised in the New York Times Book Review for "sincerity and good taste" but the reviewer found the characters underdeveloped. The novel made Highsmith a respected figure in the New York lesbian community, but as she did not publicly acknowledge authorship, it did not further her literary reputation.
In September 1953, Highsmith traveled to Fort Worth where she completed a fair copy of The Blunderer which was published the following year. In 1954 she worked on a new novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, about a young American who kills a rich compatriot in Italy and assumes his identity. She completed the novel in six months in Lenox, Santa Fe, and Mexico.
The Talented Mr. Ripley was published in December 1955 to favorable reviews in the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, their critics praising Highsmith's convincing portrait of a psychopath. The novel went on to win the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll of the Mystery Writers of America.Highsmith biographer Richard Bradford states that the novel "forged the basis for her long term reputation as a writer."
Highsmith moved to the affluent hamlet of Palisades, New York State, in 1956 and lived there for over two years. In March 1957, her story "A Perfect Alibi" was published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, beginning a long-term association with the publication.She also completed two further novels, Deep Water and A Game for the Living, and a children's book, Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, that she co-authored with Doris Sanders.
In December 1958, Highsmith moved back to Manhattan where she wrote This Sweet Sickness. The novel was published in February 1960 to generally favorable reviews. From September 1960, she lived near New Hope, Pennsylvania. There she saw René Clement's Plein Soleil, the French film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, but she was disappointed by its moralistic ending. She also wrote The Cry of the Owl which she completed in February 1962. Although Highsmith considered it one of her worst novels, novelist Brigid Brophy later rated it, along with Lolita, as one of the best since World War II.
Highsmith spent 1962 shuttling between New Hope and Europe and finishing the novel The Two Faces of January''. She had fallen in love with a married English woman and wanted to live closer to her. In February 1963, she moved permanently to Europe.