The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780312363819)

Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt is now a major motion picture (Carol) starring Cate Blanchett and Mia Wasikowska, directed by Todd Hayes

A 2010 New York Times Notable Book
A 2010 Lambda Literary Award Winner
A 2009 Edgar Award Nominee
A 2009 Agatha Award Nominee
A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week

Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite 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.

Author: Joan Schenkar
ISBN-10: 0312363818
ISBN-13: 9780312363819
Publisher: Picador USA
Language: English
Published: 01/04/2011
Pages: 704
Format: Paperback
Weight: 2.20lbs
Size: 9.10h x 5.80w x 2.00d

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 01/23/2011 pg. 20