Patricia Highsmith

Author profile

born

January 19, 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, The United States

died

February 04, 1995

gender

female

genre

Mystery & Thrillers, Literature & Fiction, Short Stories

About this author

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Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.

She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933. Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942.

Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories...more Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist who is known mainly for her psychological crime thrillers which have led to more than two dozen film adaptations over the years.

She lived with her grandmother, mother and later step-father (her mother divorced her natural father six months before 'Patsy' was born and married Stanley Highsmith) in Fort Worth before moving with her parents to New York in 1927 but returned to live with her grandmother for a year in 1933. Returning to her parents in New York, she attended public schools in New York City and later graduated from Barnard College in 1942.

Shortly after graduation her short story 'The Heroine' was published in the Harper's Bazaar magazine and it was selected as one of the 22 best stories that appeared in American magazines in 1945 and it won the O Henry award for short stories in 1946. She continued to write short stories, many of them comic book stories, and regularly earned herself a weekly $55 pay-check. During this period of her life she lived variously in New York and Mexico.

Her first suspense novel 'Strangers on a Train' published in 1950 was an immediate success with public and critics alike. The novel has been adapted for the screen three times, most notably by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

In 1955 her anti-hero Tom Ripley appeared in the splendid 'The Talented Mr Ripley', a book that was awarded the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere as the best foreign mystery novel translated into French in 1957. This book, too, has been the subject of a number of film versions. Ripley appeared again in 'Ripley Under Ground' in 1970, in 'Ripley's Game' in 1974, 'The boy who Followed Ripley' in 1980 and in 'Ripley Under Water' in 1991.

Along with her acclaimed series about Ripley, she wrote 22 novels and eight short story collections plus many other short stories, often macabre, satirical or tinged with black humour. She also wrote one novel, non-mystery, under the name Claire Morgan, plus a work of non-fiction 'Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction' and a co-written book of children's verse, 'Miranda the Panda Is on the Veranda'.

She latterly lived in England and France and was more popular in England than in her native United States. Her novel 'Deep Water', 1957, was called by the Sunday Times one of the "most brilliant analyses of psychosis in America" and Julian Symons once wrote of her "Miss Highsmith is the writer who fuses character and plot most successfully ... the most important crime novelist at present in practice." In addition, Michael Dirda observed "Europeans honoured her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus."

She died of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland on 4 February 1995 and her last novel, 'Small g: a Summer Idyll', was published posthumously a month later.

Gerry Wolstenholme
July 2010

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Books by Patricia Highsmith

Average rating: 3.83 · 22,262 ratings · 1,957 reviews · 110 distinct works

	The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1) 3.86 avg rating — 9,235 ratings — published 1955 — 65 editions	My rating:
	Strangers on a Train 3.92 avg rating — 2,224 ratings — published 1950 — 28 editions	My rating:
	The Price of Salt 3.77 avg rating — 1,528 ratings — published 1952 — 25 editions	My rating:
	Ripley's Game (Ripley, #3) 3.84 avg rating — 1,310 ratings — published 1974 — 26 editions	My rating:
	Ripley Under Ground (Ripley, #2) 3.74 avg rating — 1,249 ratings — published 1970 — 20 editions	My rating:
	The Boy Who Followed Ripley (Ripley, #4) 3.69 avg rating — 656 ratings — published 1980 — 15 editions	My rating:
	The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game 3.99 avg rating — 553 ratings — published 1985 — 4 editions	My rating:
	Ripley Under Water (Ripley, #5) 3.82 avg rating — 670 ratings — published 1992 — 20 editions	My rating:
	The Selected Stories by Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene (Foreword by) 4.03 avg rating — 288 ratings — published 2001 — 2 editions	My rating:
	Deep Water 3.80 avg rating — 292 ratings — published 1957 — 12 editions	My rating:

More books by Patricia Highsmith…

Series by Patricia Highsmith

Ripley (5 books)
by Patricia Highsmith

3.84 avg rating — 13,726 ratings

Quotes by Patricia Highsmith

“My New Year’s Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle — may they never give me peace. (New Year's Eve, 1947)”
― Patricia Highsmith

92 people liked it

“My imagination functions better when I don't have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

31 people liked it

“But there was not a moment when she did not see Carol in her mind, and all she saw, she seemed to see through Carol. That evening, the dark flat streets of New York, the tomorrow of work, the milk bottle dropped and broken in her sink, became unimportant. She flung herself on her bed and drew a line with a pencil on a piece of paper. And another line, carefully, and another. A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.”
― Patricia Highsmith, Carol

tags: love

17 people liked it

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Polls

Please select the book you would most like to see featured as our next Convergent Read (beginning October 15th):

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

23 votes, 35.4%

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

15 votes, 23.1%

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

14 votes, 21.5%

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

12 votes, 18.5%

Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang

1 vote, 1.5%

65 total votes

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