Patricia Highsmith Biography Quotes 23 Report mistakes

Early Life
Patricia Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman on January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas. Her parents, Mary and Jay Bernard Plangman, separated before she was born, and her mother later married the commercial artist Stanley Highsmith, whose surname Patricia eventually took. Much of her early childhood was spent in Texas with her maternal grandmother before she moved to New York City to live with her mother and stepfather. The relationship with her mother was famously fraught; Highsmith later recounted that her mother once told her she had attempted to abort the pregnancy by drinking turpentine, a remark that haunted her and colored her lifelong preoccupation with betrayal, duplicity, and uneasy domestic bonds.

Education and Apprenticeship
Highsmith graduated from Barnard College in 1942, studying English and honing a voice that favored psychological acuity over overt moralizing. After college she supported herself by writing scripts for comic books at various houses, an efficient if unglamorous apprenticeship that taught her economy of plotting and the choreography of suspense. She also began keeping rigorous notebooks and diaries, practicing the observational distance that would become central to her fiction.

Breakthrough and Literary Circle
Her debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), immediately established her as a master of psychological suspense. The book drew the attention of editor Joan Kahn, a pivotal early champion, and within a year Alfred Hitchcock adapted it for the screen, cementing Highsmith's international profile. The eerie premise of exchanged murders, unspooling from a casual encounter, announced her signature interest: ordinary people under extraordinary moral pressure. The acclaim brought her into conversation with writers who admired her cool, exacting style, among them Graham Greene, who praised her as a poet of apprehension.

Carol and Identity
Highsmith's second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, departed from crime conventions to tell a lesbian love story set in midcentury America. Drawing in part on her own experiences and a galvanizing encounter while working a temporary job in a department store, the novel followed Therese and the older, married Carol through desire and social risk toward an unusually hopeful ending. Its frankness, and the refusal to punish its characters, made it a landmark in queer literature. When Highsmith allowed it to be reissued under her own name in 1990 as Carol, it brought renewed attention and introduced her work to a new generation of readers.

Tom Ripley and International Reputation
With The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Highsmith created Tom Ripley, a charming, amoral striver whose aesthetic tastes and moral vacancy let him glide through crime with unnerving grace. She would return to him in Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991). The character became an enduring figure in world literature. Directors and actors found in Ripley a canvas for ambiguity: Rene Clement's Purple Noon (1960) introduced Alain Delon's unforgettable Ripley to European audiences, and Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) transposed Highsmith's anxieties to a neon-lit, transatlantic underworld. Graham Greene's public admiration helped secure her standing among serious novelists who treated crime as a lens on human nature.

Life in Europe
In the early 1960s Highsmith moved to Europe, living for stretches in England and France before settling in Switzerland. She made her home in the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino, preferring a quiet routine of reading, writing, and gardening. In Zurich, her publisher Daniel Keel at Diogenes Verlag became a crucial ally, ensuring her books remained continuously in print and visible across languages. Highsmith guarded her privacy, yet cultivated exacting professional ties with the editors and translators who sustained her readership on the continent. The distance from the United States suited her temperament and sharpened her themes of alienation and moral drift.

Style, Themes, and Working Method
Highsmith's prose is spare, lucid, and cool to the touch, allowing dread to accumulate through precise detail rather than melodrama. She favored plots in which chance encounters rupture everyday life, then followed the logic of desire, fear, and opportunity wherever it led. Her narrators are intimate with the criminal mind yet avoid moral sermonizing, a stance that unsettled some contemporaries and enthralled others. Animals, objects, and settings often carry psychological charge; she famously kept and observed snails, an emblem of patient, secret life that she sometimes wrote about with wry affection. She drafted longhand, revised meticulously, and treated her notebooks as a testing ground for scenes and ethical puzzles.

Personal Life
Highsmith had relationships with women throughout her life, and for a time in the late 1950s and early 1960s she was involved with the writer Marijane Meaker, who later wrote about their time together. Friends and lovers often found her brilliant, frank, and difficult in equal measure. The complicated bond with her mother never fully eased, and her sense of apartness fed both her reclusiveness and the imaginative freedom of her fiction. She maintained cordial, if guarded, ties with her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, whose artistic profession had marked her childhood as a place where making images and narratives was a plausible way to live.

Other Notable Works and Reception
Beyond the Ripley series, Highsmith published a string of unsettling novels, including Deep Water, This Sweet Sickness, The Cry of the Owl, The Two Faces of January, and A Suspension of Mercy, as well as short story collections that displayed her terse, ironic bite. Critics recognized that she pushed the psychological novel into territory where crime is less a plot contrivance than a diagnostic tool. While the American market sometimes wavered in its support, European readers and filmmakers remained steadfast, amplifying her reputation as a cosmopolitan chronicler of unease.

Legacy and Final Years
Highsmith spent her later years largely in Switzerland, continuing to write and to manage an ever-expanding afterlife of adaptations. She welcomed the 1990 restoration of The Price of Salt under her own name as Carol. New film versions of her novels kept arriving, and after her death they multiplied: Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley and Todd Haynes's Carol introduced her darkness and tenderness to audiences who had never read her. She died on February 4, 1995, in Locarno, Switzerland. By then, the contours of her influence were clear. Writers, critics, and directors had come to see in Patricia Highsmith a rare kind of novelist: one who made the ordinary frightening, the criminal familiar, and the fragile border between the two a field for inexhaustible exploration.

Our collection contains 23 quotes who is written by Patricia, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Justice - Writing - Work Ethic - Movie.

Other people realated to Patricia: Adrian Lyne (Director), Roger Spottiswoode (Director)