Patricia Highsmith

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Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 – February 4, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer best known for her psychological thrillers, as well as her five books starring Tom Ripley.

She wrote 22 books and many short stories in her career that spanned nearly five decades, and her work has resulted in more than two dozen film adaptations.

Her writing derived from existentialist literature, as well as challenging concepts of identity and popular morality.

She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene. Strangers on a Train was her first book, as well as by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

Mr. Ripley's 1955 book The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted numerous times for film, theatre, and radio.

Highsmith wrote under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan" in 1952. The Price of Salt, the first lesbian book with a happy ending, was republished 38 years later, as Carol under her own name and later converted into a 2015 film.

Early life

Mary Patricia Plangman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and her Highsmith was Mary Patricia Plangman. She was the only child of artist Jay Bernard Plangman (1889–1975), who was of German descent, and Mary Plangman (née Coates; 1895 – March 12, 1991). The couple separated ten days before their daughter's birth.

Highsmith, mother and her adoptive stepfather, artist Stanley Highsmith, who had been born in 1924, immigrated to New York City in 1927. When she was 12 years old, Highsmith was sent to Fort Worth and spent a year with her maternal grandmother. She called this year the "best year" of her life, and her mother "abandoned" her. She returned to New York to continue living with her mother and stepfather, primarily in Manhattan, but also in Astoria, Queens.

According to Highsmith, her mother once told her that she had threatened to kill her by drinking turpentine, but a biography of Highsmith shows Jay Plangman attempted to tell his wife to have the abortion but she refused. Highsmith never settled on this love-hate relationship, which reportedly haunted her for the remainder of her life and in "The Terrapin," her short story about a teenage boy who stabs his mother to death. Sadly, a Highsmith's mother survived her by just four years, dying at the age of 95.

At an early age, the Highsmith's grandmother taught her to read, and she made good use of her grandmother's extensive library. She discovered a similarity to her own imaginative life in Karl Menninger's case histories, a leading interpreter of Freudian analysis.

Many of Highsmith's 22 books were set in Greenwich Village, where she lived on 48 Grove Street from 1940 to 1942 before transferring to 345 E. 57th Street. Highsmith graduated from Barnard College, where she studied English composition, playwriting, and short story prose. After graduating from college and despite endorsements from "highly placed professionals," she applied for a job at Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker.

Highsmith was accepted by the Yaddo artist's retreat in 1948, where she worked on her first book, Strangers on a Train, based on Truman Capote's suggestion.

Personal life

All of Highsmith's life, she suffered with cycles of depression, some of whom were severe. "I] am now cynical, remarkably wealthy, and completely skeptical," she wrote in her diary from January 1970: "I am now cynical, remarkably wealthy, lonely, and utterly pessimistic." Highsmith had female hormone deficiencies, anorexia nervosa, chronic anemia, Buerger's disease, and lung cancer over the years.

Highsmith's personal life, according to her biographer, Andrew Wilson, was a "troubled one." She was a alcoholic who, according to others, had no intimate relationship that lasted more than five years, and she was depicted by some of her contemporaries and acquaintances as misanthropic and hostile. As she got older, her alcoholic obsession heightened.

"I choose to live alone because my imagination works better when I don't have to talk to people," she said in a 1991 interview.

But her books?

Highsmith's acquaintances, journalists, and acquaintances had conflicting opinions. "She was very tough, very difficult," editor Gary Fisketjon, who later published her books on Knopf. However, she was also very funny, dry, and a great deal to be around." Composer David Diamond met Highsmith in 1943 and described her as "quite a depressed person" — and I believe some people explain her by removing features like cold and reserved when in truth it all came from depression. "The author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley was every bit as deviant and bizarre as her mischievous heroes," J. G. Ballard said of Highsmith. Phyllis Nagy, a screenwriter who adapted The Price of Salt for the 2015 film Carol, met Highsmith in 1987 and the two became friends for the remainder of Highsmith's life. Highsmith, according to Nagy, was "very sweet" and "encouraging" to her as a young writer, as well as "wonderfully funny."

Some people characterized her as "a lesbian with a misogynist streak."

Highsmith adored cats, and she raised about three hundred snails in her garden at home in Suffolk, England. Highsmith once held a "gigantic handbag" that "contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails" who she described as her "companions for the evening."

She adored woodworking tools and made several pieces of furniture. Highsmith went on without stopping. She became stooped with an osteoporotic hump in later life. Although the 22 books and 8 books of short stories she wrote were well-received, especially outside of the United States, Highsmith's personal life was preferring to remain private.

Highsmith, a lifelong diarist, left eight thousand pages of handwritten notebooks and diaries behind.

Patricia Highsmith's intimate relationships as an adult were largely with women. "The male face doesn't attract me," she wrote in her diary, "isn't beautiful to me." Marijane Meaker, a writer from the late 1950s, told writer Marijane Meaker that she had "tried to like men." I like most men better than women, but not in bed." "I can assure you it's a little more uncomfortable in bed" in a 1970 letter to her stepfather Stanley. Phyllis Nagy characterized Highsmith as "a lesbian who didn't particularly like being around other women" and that the few sexual encounters she had with men ended just to "see if she could be into men in that way because she so much more desired their company."

Highsmith died in 1943 after an affair with artist Allela Cornell, who was insecure over an uninitiated love from another woman, committed suicide in 1946 by taking nitric acid.

Highsmith met writer Marc Brandel, son of author J. D. Beresford, during her stay in Yaddo. Despite her disclosure of her homosexuality, the couple soon began a brief affair. She begged him to visit him in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he introduced her to Ann Smith, a painter and designer with a previous career as a Vogue fashion model, and the two couples became engaged. After Smith left Provincetown, Highsmith believed she was "in prison" with Brandel and told him she was leaving him. "B]ecause of that, I have to sleep with him, and only the fact that it is the last night makes it bearable." He had never been sexually exclusive with Brandel, so he resent having sex with him. After the well-received publication of his latest book, the Highsmith temporarily broke off his relationship with Brandel and continued to be involved with many people. Highsmith underwent psychoanalysis, beginning in November 30, 1948, and continuing for the next six months, in an attempt to "regularize herself sexually" so she could marry Brandel. Highsmith brought the investigation to a halt, causing her to end her friendship with him.

After ending her relationship with Marc Brandel, she had an affair with psychoanalyst Kathryn Hamill Cohen, the wife of British publisher Dennis Cohen and publisher of Cresset Press, which later released Strangers on a Train.

During the Christmas rush season in Bloomingdale's toy department, Highsmith had taken a sales job to help pay for the two-week therapy sessions. Highsmith was inspired to write her semi-autobiographical book The Price of Salt, in which two women meet in a department store and begin a passionate affair, ironically.

Highsmith was denied a long flirtation with Arthur Koestler in 1950, despite the fact that Brandel's admission that she was homosexual, as well as the publication of The Price of Salt, may have harmed her professionally.

Ellen Blumenthal Hill, a sociologist, began an affair in early September 1951, and she returned home and forth to Europe to visit her. "Highsmith and Hill's relationship in early May 1953 began in an "impossible" relationship with homosexual German photographer Rolf Tietgens, who had had been "sporadic, intense, and unconsummated" in her psychological life since 1943. According to reports, she was attracted to Tietgens as a result of his homosexuality, remarking that she felt with him "as if he is another girl or a specifically innocent man." Many nude photographs of Highsmith were shot by Tietgens, but only one survived, torn in half at the waist, so only her upper body is visible. Tietgens dedicated The Two Faces of January (1964) to her niece Tietgens.

Highsmith was in love with author Marijane Meaker from 1959 to 1961. Meaker wrote lesbian tales under the pseudonym "Ann Aldrich" and suspense fiction as "Vin Packer" and "Suspense Fiction," and later wrote young adult fiction under the name "M. E. "Kerr" is a kerr. Highsmith began collaborating with Meaker in the late 1980s, after 27 years of separation, and one day he appeared on Meaker's doorstep, marginally inebriated and ranting bitterly. Meaker later expressed disappointment at how Highsmith's personality had changed.

The highsmith attracted women of wealth who deserved their partners to treat them with veneration. She belonged to a "very specific group of lesbians" and described her behavior with several women she was interested in as being similar to a film "studio boss" who chased actresses, according to Phyllis Nagy. Many of these women, who to a certain extent belonged to the 'Carol Aird' style and her social circle, remained friendly with Highsmith and confirmed the tales of seduction.

Highsmith, a highly private individual, was remarkably open and outspoken about her sexuality. "The only difference between us and heterosexuals is what we do in bed," she told Meaker.

Highsmith died on February 4, 1995, at the village where she had lived since 1982, at the Carita Hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, where she had died from a combination of aplastic anemia and lung cancer. She was cremated at the cemetery in Bellinzona; a memorial service was held in the Chiesa di Tegna, Ticino, Switzerland; and her ashes were laid in its columbarium.

She left her estate, which is worth an estimated $3 million, as well as the promise of any future royal links to the Yaddo colony, where she spent two months in 1948 drafting the draft of Strangers on a Train. Highsmith bequeathed her literary estate to the Swiss Literary Archives at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland. Diogenes Verlag, the estate's literary executor, was appointed by her Swiss publisher Diogenes Verlag.

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