A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: American mystery writer, whose works were especially successful in Europe. Highsmith has explored the psychology of guilt and abnormal behavior in a world without firm moral ground. Often her novels deal with questions of fading identity and double personality. She also published several volumes of short stories in the fields of fantasy, horror, and comedy. Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train was based on Highsmith's novel and her series character, Tom Ripley, has inspired several films. Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in New York. Her mother, Mary, was a commercial artist. Her father was Jay Bernard Plangman. However, her parents were divorced four months before she was born. When Patricia was three her mother then married Stanley Highsmith. Patricia was unaware that Stanley Highsmith was not he biological father until she was 10. She met Jay Bernard Plangman when she was 12. This gave her a confused sense of identity. For much of her early life she was cared for by her maternal grandmother. She was educated at Barnard College, where she studied English Latin, and Greek, earning her B.A. in 1942. As a child and in his youth Highsmith showed talents in arts - she painted and remained talented sculptor, but she had determined to be a writer. She had written as a teenager stories and after leaving college she worked with comic books, supplying the writers with plots. Before her first book, Highsmith had a number of jobs, including that of a saleswoman at a New York Store. She first travelled to Europe in 1949 and moved in a nomadic way through England, Italy, France, and Switzerland. In spite of being a bestselling writer in Germany, France, Austria, and other European countries, and in spite of the great fame accorded her first novel, Strangers on a Train, and the film adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, Highsmith enjoyed no success in her native America, and she became an expatriate, living virtually all of her adult life in Europe. He first novel Strangers on a Train was published in 1950 and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. It depicts two men, an architect and a psychopath, who meet on a train, and "swap" murders. "Some people are better off dead -like your wife and my father, for instance," states Bruno, the rich psychopath and proceeds to carry out his part of the bargain. This work set the tone for her following novels, in which two different worlds intersect and the border between normal and abnormal persons is seen vague and perhaps nonexistent. "Any kind of person can murder. Purely circumstances and not a thing to do with temperament! People get so far - and it takes just the least little thing to push them over the brink. Anybody. Even your grandmother. I know." (from Strangers on a Train) Her lesbian novel The Price of Salt, (1952), which had been turned down by her previous American publisher because of its frank exploration of homosexual themes, was published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and may have been the first American lesbian or gay novel to have a positive ending. The book was re-published in 1984 under the title Carol and under her own name and with an afterword. The importance of The Price of Salt is that it's considered to be the very first, or at least one of the very few early lesbian pulp fiction novels to have an upbeat ending. "I was introduced to Therese and Carol, the two protagonists in Highsmith's lesbian romance The Price of Salt, my Sophomore year of college in a Gay and Lesbian Lit. Class. The professor told the class she had picked the book because it was well written and it presented an interesting twist to a gay love story, no one dies or goes straight at the end (imagine that). This alone is not necessarily compelling enough to get someone to read Salt, after all, today's gay and lesbian love stories often end in positive and fulfilled ways. But for Highsmith's Salt, written in the 1950s, this was a stretch. The reader will enjoy the subtleness of the prose and the in-depth look at the confusion and chaos that can occur when two women come together and realize their mutual attraction and then love for each other. In addition, the novel is a dynamic look at 1950s America as the characters adventure out of New York and off into the Great American Wide Open. I encourage gay and straight readers to venture forth with Therese and Carol. Salt allows a beautiful look into the world of finding one's soul mate and falling in love. Because, above all, Highsmith has written a love story, not just a lesbian work of fiction." -- Anonymous Review Highsmith dealt with sexual minorities in her other works, and her final novel, Small G: a summer idyll (1995), depicted a bar in Zurich, where a number of homosexual, heterosexual, and bisexual characters are in love with the wrong people. She wrote 20 novels and seven collections of stories. Her most highly regarded novels are the five about the criminal adventures of the amoral, psychotic ant-hero Tom Ripley. In 1957 Highsmith won the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and the British Crime Writers Association awarded her a Silver Dagger in 1964. She has also won the O. Henry Memorial Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award. She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne. Her most popular character is Tom Ripley, a small-time con man and bisexual serial killer, who was introduced to the world in The talented Mr. Ripley (1955). The critic and awarded mystery writer H.R.F. Keating included the work in his Crime & Mystery: the 100 Best Books (1987). The book was first filmed in 1960 under the title Plein Soleil (Purple Noon), directed by René Clément , starring Alain Delon. The likeable amateur murderer Ripley inspired the Wim Wenders film The American Friend (1977), starring Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray. Ripley became Highsmith's most enduring character, who could be a sadist and an understanding husband, a parody of upper-class mentality and a criminal only by force of circumstances. After The talented Mr. Ripley the ambivalent hero appeared in several sequels, among them Ripley under ground (1970), in which he is in danger of being discovered to have defrauded a large company out of a fortune, which could cost him his wealthy wife, Ripley's game (1974), where a casual snub causes Tom to concoct a scheme involving several murders, the Mafia, and a great deal of money, The boy who followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley under water (1991), the final Ripley adventure, in which Ripley is pursued by a sadistic American, who knows too much of his past. As a reclusive person, Highsmith spent most of her life alone. She was reluctant to talk about her private life, but she kept diaries which were made available to her biographer Andrew Wilson. These reveal that she had several female lovers. She lived with the novelist Ann Aldrich in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in the late 1950s, but most of her adult life was spent in Europe, and she finally settled in Switzerland in 1963. Her final years Highsmith spent in an isolated house near Locarno on the Swiss-Italian border. - She died in Switzerland on February 4, 1995. Highsmith's works outside mystery genre include a juvenile book, short stories, and non-fiction. Several of Highsmith's works fall out from the mystery genre and her crime novels often have more to do with psychology than conventional plotitbusng. Russel Harrison has argued that Highsmith's fiction demonstrates elements of existentialism as linked to Sartre and Camus, and reflects sociopolitical concerns to the gay and lesbian issues of 1980s and 1990s. Works:
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