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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks - 1941-1995 (Hardcover)
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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks - 1941-1995 (Hardcover)
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Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia
Highsmith is now recognized as one of "our greatest modernist
writers" (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real
psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive
Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering
herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously,
her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and
notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet-with tantalizing instructions
to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled
from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable
figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at
Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and
notebook-the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm
stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook
simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith's personal
affairs seeped into her fiction-and the sheer darkness of her own
imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young "Pat"
lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village,
barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others.
Alongside Flannery O'Conner and Chester Himes, she attended-at the
recommendation of Truman Capote-the Yaddo artist colony in 1948,
where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon
adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition
and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith
agonizing: "What is the life I choose?" Providing extraordinary
insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century
America, Highsmith's diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price
of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published
under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no
one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting
love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from
America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe,
subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical
with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects
in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the
unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this
sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At
once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her
turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must
be "a few usable things in literature." A memoir as significant in
our own century as Sylvia Plath's journals and Simone de Beauvoir's
writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and
Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman's rise
against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
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