Patricia Highsmith

American · 1921 to 1995

Born Mary Patricia Plangman on January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas, to commercial artists who divorced nine days before her birth, she was raised in her earliest years by her maternal grandmother and a household of Texas cousins. Her mother had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine, a fact she told the child early and often; the failed-abortion story became a permanent wound. At six she was taken to New York to live with her mother and stepfather, whose surname she took. She read Karl Menninger's The Human Mind at nine and decided to become a writer of abnormal psychology. After Barnard she wrote scripts for Standard, Fawcett, and Timely comics, drafting Jap-Buster Johnson and Black Terror by day while writing her own fiction at night. Truman Capote got her into Yaddo in 1948, where she finished Strangers on a Train (1950); Alfred Hitchcock bought the rights for $7,500 the next year. The Price of Salt (1952), her lesbian romance published under a pseudonym after Harper rejected it, sold a million paperback copies on the strength of its rare happy ending. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) gave her the cool sociopathic American abroad she would return to in four sequels. She moved to England in 1963, then France, then a bunker-like house in Tegna, Switzerland, where she kept snails as pets and grew increasingly antisemitic, misanthropic, and alcoholic. Graham Greene called her the poet of apprehension. She died in Locarno on February 4, 1995, at seventy-four, of aplastic anaemia and lung cancer, her ashes scattered in a Catholic cemetery beside the local lake.