Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith was born in Texas and spent her first years with her grandmother before moving to New York to live with her mother and stepfather – a difficult relationship that marked her life. After studying at Barnard College she wrote stories for comic books.

Her first novel, “Strangers on a Train” (1950), was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock. With “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1955) she created the charming, amoral murderer Tom Ripley, who appeared in five novels. Her psychological thrillers, in which ordinary people slide into guilt and violence, made her famous, especially in Europe.

Highsmith had relationships with women throughout her life, many of them stormy. In 1952, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, she published “The Price of Salt”, the story of a young woman who falls in love with an older, married woman named Carol. Unusually for the time, the novel ended happily; it sold around a million copies and gave many lesbian readers hope. Only in 1990 did she publish it under her own name, as “Carol”; it was filmed in 2015.

From 1981 she lived withdrawn in Ticino, Switzerland. Her diaries and late statements reveal pronounced antisemitic and racist views. She died in Locarno in 1995, aged 74, and left her estate to the Yaddo artists’ colony.