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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks - Patricia Highsmith & Anna Von Planta

By Patricia Highsmith & Anna Von Planta

Release Date: 2021-11-16

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

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New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021
The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year
Excerpted in The New Yorker
Profiled in The Los Angeles Times
Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times).
Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read.

For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination.

Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?”

Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame.

At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks - Patricia Highsmith & Anna Von Planta

By Patricia Highsmith & Anna Von Planta

Release Date: 2021-11-16

Genre: Biographies & Memoirs

(0 ratings)
Read Download
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021
The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year
Excerpted in The New Yorker
Profiled in The Los Angeles Times
Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times).
Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read.

For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination.

Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?”

Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame.

At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.

More by Patricia Highsmith & Anna Von Planta

The Talented Mr. Ripley

The Price of Salt, or Carol

Strangers on a Train

Deep Water

The Price of Salt

Carol (Movie Tie-in Edition)

Ripley Under Ground

Ripley's Game

The Blunderer

The Boy Who Followed Ripley

The Two Faces of January

Ripley Under Water

The Cry of the Owl

This Sweet Sickness

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks

The Price of Salt (Illustrated Edition)

The Tremor of Forgery

Little Tales of Misogyny

Nothing That Meets the Eye

A Suspension of Mercy

Eleven

The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder

People Who Knock on the Door

The Black House

A Dog's Ransom

The Glass Cell

Mermaids on the Golf Course

Found in the Street

Merchants of Menace

Small g

Strangers on a Train

Crime Novels: Four Classic Thrillers 1964-1969 (LOA #371)

Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

A Game for the Living

Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

Carol

El grito de la lechuza

El talento de Mr. Ripley

El diario de Edith

Ripley Under Ground

Il talento di Mr. Ripley

CrĂ­menes imaginarios

Those Who Walk Away

La mĂĄscara de Ripley

Ese dulce mal

Zwei Fremde im Zug

Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks

Der talentierte Mr. Ripley

Tom Ripley

Le talentueux Mr Ripley - Nouvelle ĂŠdition

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