Patricia Highsmith, one of the greatest writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favourite "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, "Strangers On a Train", to her long, strange, self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and an erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. "The Talented Miss Highsmith" is the first literary biography with access to Highsmith's whole story: her closest friends, her oeuvre, her archives. It's a compulsive page-turner unlike any other, a book worthy of Highsmith herself.
- ISBN10 0312363818
- ISBN13 9780312363819
- Publish Date 4 January 2011 (first published 16 December 2009)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 23 September 2016
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Picador USA
- Format Paperback (UK Trade)
- Pages 704
- Language English