At age eight. Patricia Highsmith found a copy of Karl Menninger’s The Human Mind in her parents’ library. Fascinated by the psychiatrist’s descriptions of mental disorders, she began a diary in which she depicted the denizens of her suburban neighborhood as psychopaths and murderous schizophrenics. She spent her adult life writing novels and short stories filled with sexually ambiguous, darkly secretive, diabolical characters.
After graduating from Barnard College, she got a job in New York City writing for comic books, two stories a day for $55 a week. After six or seven years of comics she began serious work on a novel. She met Truman CAPOTE during a visit to the Yaddo writers’ colony and he encouraged her to continue on the book. The result, Strangers on a Train, was published in 1950 and filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The relationship between the two central male characters is highly charged with homoerotic volleys.
Strangers was followed by a book her publishers refused due to its lesbian theme. She took The Price of Salt to another publisher who released it in 1951 under a pen name, Claire Morgan, It sold over a million copies and became popular reading among lesbians who appreciated its positive portrayal of two women in love.
From 1955 to 1991 she wrote a series of five novels about a conscienceless young con man who develops unhealthy obsessions with other men before he kills them. The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first installment of the Ripliad, was made into a blockbuster film starring Matt Damon in 1999. Two of the other Ripley novels have been filmed and, in all, over thirty of her stories have been adapted for film or television.
Highsmith was bisexual but generally preferred the company of animals to people. Marijane Meaker, whose Spring Fire launched the genre of lesbian pulp fiction in 1952, wrote of her relationship with Highsmith in her memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950s.
Highsmith grew to dislike the US for its foreign policy and cultural backwardness and went into self-exile in Switzerland in 1963. The feeling was mutual and it was only after her death that she began to achieve serious recognition for her work in her home country.