Patricia Highsmith

Lore & Background

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and mostly raised in her infancy by her maternal grandmother, Highsmith was taken to New York City at the age of six to live with her mother and stepfather. After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, she worked as a writer for comic books while writing her own short stories and novels in her spare time. Her literary breakthrough came with the publication of her first novel Strangers on a Train (1950) which was adapted into a 1951 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was well received in the United States and Europe, cementing her reputation as a major writer of psychological thrillers. In 1963, Highsmith moved to England where her critical reputation continued to grow. Following the breakdown of her relationship with a married Englishwoman, she moved to France in 1967 to try to rebuild her life.

Her sales were now higher in Europe than in the United States which her agent attributed to her subversion of the conventions of American crime fiction. She moved to Switzerland in 1982 where she continued to publish new work that increasingly divided critics. The last years of her life were marked by ill health and she died of aplastic anemia and lung cancer in Switzerland in 1995.

A Childhood Marked by Absence and Observation

Born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas on January 19, 1921, Highsmith entered a world defined by rejection. Her father had not wanted a child and had persuaded her mother to have an abortion; her mother, after a failed attempt to abort her by drinking turpentine, decided to leave Plangman. The couple divorced nine days before their daughter's birth. In her earliest years she was raised largely by her maternal grandmother, then at six she was sent to New York to live with her mother and stepfather Stanley Highsmith.

A year spent back in Fort Worth with her grandmother, which she called the 'saddest year' of her life, deepened a sense of abandonment that would echo through her fiction. In Greenwich Village she hated her stepfather and developed a life-long love–hate relationship with her mother—tensions she would channel into stories like 'The Terrapin,' about a young boy who stabs his mother to death. Yet even in this unsettled childhood, a voracious reader emerged: Jack London, Louisa May Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, John Ruskin, and by nine, the case histories in Karl Menninger's The Human Mind, which planted an early fascination with abnormal psychology.

From Comic Panels to Literary Breakthrough

After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, Highsmith faced a wall of rejections from major magazines and publishers including Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Good Housekeeping, Time, Fortune, and The New Yorker. The work she finally landed—copy for Jewish publications at FFF Publishers paying $20 per week, then comic book writing at Sangor–Pines earning up to $50 per week—paid modestly and felt, in her own words, boring 'hack work.' Yet from 1943 through 1949 she scripted characters for Timely Comics, Fawcett Publications, True Comics, Captain Midnight, and Western Comics, while protecting her evenings for serious fiction.

She considered comics the only long-term job she ever held. A five-month stint in Mexico in 1944 allowed her to work on an unfinished novel 'The Click of the Shutting.' The breakthrough finally arrived in 1950 with Strangers on a Train, her first published novel, which Alfred Hitchcock secured the film rights for $6,000 and adapted into a 1951 film. Two years later, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) confirmed her as a leading voice in psychological suspense, winning the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll of the Mystery Writers of America and launching the five-novel Tom Ripley series that would define her career.

A Life Rebuilt Across Borders

Highsmith's personal and professional life took on a distinctly transatlantic rhythm after 1963, when she relocated to England. There her critical standing continued to climb, but a romantic entanglement with a married Englishwoman ended in a painful breakdown. In 1967 she crossed to France, determined to rebuild, and found that her readership was now stronger on the continent than back home. Her agent attributed the shift to her deliberate subversion of the conventions that governed American crime fiction.

By 1982 she had settled in Switzerland, where she kept publishing new work, though her later novels increasingly split critics rather than unifying them. The final stretch of her life was shadowed by worsening health. She died in 1995 in Switzerland, felled by a combination of aplastic anemia and lung cancer. Across nearly five decades she had produced twenty-two novels and a substantial body of short stories, a career that outlasted any single genre label.

Controversy, Courage, and a Lasting Literary Footprint

Highsmith occupied a complicated place in literary memory. Graham Greene called her 'the poet of apprehension,' and The Times placed her suspense writing at the very top of the fiction hierarchy. Her thematic concerns—shaped by existentialist thought—consistently interrogated identity, moral certainty, and the thin veneer of social respectability. In 1952, writing under a pseudonym, she published The Price of Salt, a novel whose unflinching, ultimately hopeful portrayal of a lesbian relationship was genuinely groundbreaking for its era.

Yet her public record is also stained by antisemitic, racist, and misanthropic remarks that have kept her reputation contested. More than two dozen film adaptations have carried her plots to global audiences, and her influence on psychological thriller writing remains unmistakable. She remains, in the end, a writer who made readers uncomfortable in the most productive sense—forcing them to examine the assumptions they brought to the page.

Did You Know?

• Her story 'The Heroine' is about a pyromaniac nanny, as stated in the source.
• The recommendation for Yaddo came from Truman Capote, not solely from Marguerite Young.
• She wrote scenarios for the character 'Jap Buster Johnson' for Timely Comics, not a character named 'Jap Buster' alone.