95 Facts About Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories in a career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations.

Patricia Highsmith's writing was influenced by existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality.

Patricia Highsmith was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene.

In 1963, Patricia Highsmith moved to England where her critical reputation continued to grow.

Patricia Highsmith's 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.

Patricia Highsmith moved to Switzerland in 1982 where she continued to publish new work that increasingly divided critics.

Patricia Highsmith remains controversial for her antisemitic, racist and misanthropic statements.

Patricia Highsmith was the only child of commercial artists Jay Bernard Plangman and Mary Plangman.

Patricia Highsmith's father had not wanted a child and had persuaded her mother to have an abortion.

In 1927 Patricia Highsmith moved to New York City to live with her mother and her stepfather, commercial artist Stanley Patricia Highsmith, whom her mother had married in 1924.

Patricia Highsmith called this the "saddest year" of her life and felt "abandoned" by her mother.

Patricia Highsmith attended the all-girl Julia Richman High School where she achieved a B minus average grade.

In 1938 Patricia Highsmith entered Barnard College where her studies included English literature, playwriting and short story composition.

Patricia Highsmith continued to read voraciously, kept diaries and notebooks, and developed an interest in eastern philosophy, Marx and Freud.

Patricia Highsmith read Thomas Wolfe, Marcel Proust and Julien Green with admiration.

Patricia Highsmith published nine stories in the college literary magazine and became its editor in her senior year.

Patricia Highsmith wrote "Sergeant Bill King" stories, contributed to Black Terror and Fighting Yank comics, and wrote profiles such as Catherine the Great, Barney Ross, and Capt.

Patricia Highsmith considered comics boring "hack work" and was determined to become a novelist.

Patricia Highsmith's agents advised her that her stories needed to be more "upbeat" to be marketable but she wanted to write stories that reflected her vision of the world.

In 1946, Patricia Highsmith read Albert Camus' The Stranger and was impressed by his absurdist vision.

Patricia Highsmith read an anthology of Kierkegaard on the trip and declared him her new "master".

Patricia Highsmith returned to New York in October 1949 and began writing The Price of Salt, a novel about a lesbian relationship.

Patricia Highsmith stayed for two years, traveling and working on an unfinished novel, "The Traffic of Jacob's Ladder," which is lost.

The novel made Patricia Highsmith a respected figure in the New York lesbian community, but as she did not publicly acknowledge authorship, it did not further her literary reputation.

In September 1953, Patricia Highsmith traveled to Fort Worth where she completed a fair copy of The Blunderer which was published the following year.

Patricia Highsmith completed the novel in six months in Lenox, Santa Fe, and Mexico.

The Talented Mr Ripley was published in December 1955 to favorable reviews in the New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker, their critics praising Patricia Highsmith's convincing portrait of a psychopath.

Patricia Highsmith moved to the affluent hamlet of Palisades, New York State, in 1956 and lived there for over two years.

Patricia Highsmith completed two further novels, Deep Water and A Game for the Living, and a children's book, Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda, that she co-authored with Doris Sanders.

In December 1958, Patricia Highsmith moved back to Manhattan where she wrote This Sweet Sickness.

Patricia Highsmith wrote The Cry of the Owl which she completed in February 1962.

Patricia Highsmith spent 1962 shuttling between New Hope and Europe and finishing the novel The Two Faces of January.

Patricia Highsmith had fallen in love with a married English woman and wanted to live closer to her.

Patricia Highsmith rented an apartment in Positano where she worked on her prison novel The Glass Cell.

Patricia Highsmith then traveled to London where she promoted The Cry of the Owl, newly published in Britain.

Patricia Highsmith was quarreling with her mother and under severe emotional strain due to her difficult relationship with her English lover.

Patricia Highsmith was drinking heavily and her private and public behavior was becoming more eccentric and antisocial.

Patricia Highsmith's books were selling poorly in America which her agent suggested was because they were "too subtle".

In 1970, Patricia Highsmith flew to the United States where she visited New York and her family in Fort Worth.

Patricia Highsmith drew on her trip for her novel A Dog's Ransom which is set in Manhattan.

Patricia Highsmith praised the film but was displeased with Dennis Hopper as Ripley.

In 1980 Patricia Highsmith underwent bypass surgery to correct uncontrolled bleeding and serious cardiovascular problems.

In 1981, Patricia Highsmith moved into her Swiss home and began writing a new novel, People who Knock on the Door, about the influence of Christian fundamentalism in America.

In 1986, Patricia Highsmith had a successful operation for lung cancer.

Patricia Highsmith died on February 4,1995, at 74, from aplastic anemia and lung cancer at Carita Hospital in Locarno, Switzerland, near Tegna.

Patricia Highsmith was cremated at the cemetery in Bellinzona; a memorial service was conducted in the Chiesa di Tegna in Tegna and her ashes were interred in its columbarium.

Patricia Highsmith left her estate, worth an estimated $3 million, and the promise of any future royalties, to the Yaddo colony, where she spent two months in 1948 writing the draft of Strangers on a Train.

Patricia Highsmith bequeathed her literary estate to the Swiss Literary Archives at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland.

Patricia Highsmith had anorexia as a teenager and episodes of depression throughout her life.

Patricia Highsmith smoked 40 Gauloises cigarettes a day and rarely ate fruit and vegetables.

Patricia Highsmith underwent surgery in May 1980 for blockages in two arteries of her right leg, and in April 1986 she had successful surgery for lung cancer.

Patricia Highsmith was ambitious and socially active in the 1940s but always preferred smaller gatherings to large crowds and public functions.

Patricia Highsmith brought her pet snails to one dinner party in the 1960s and let them wander over the mahogany.

Patricia Highsmith had two friends as house guests in 1971 and threw a dead rat into their room.

Patricia Highsmith often made racist or insensitive comments which offended and embarrassed those present.

Patricia Highsmith kept 300 snails at her home in Earl Soham and occasionally took some with her on social outings.

Patricia Highsmith said that when she moved to France she smuggled her snails into the country in her bra.

Patricia Highsmith was an accomplished gardener, but in her later years her friends and neighbors did most of the work on her gardens.

Patricia Highsmith called herself "basically polygamous" and was consistently unfaithful to her lovers.

Patricia Highsmith noted in her 1949 diary that she couldn't sustain any relationship for more than two to three years.

When Patricia Highsmith's mother stayed with her in England for six days in 1965 it ended in a physical altercation and Patricia Highsmith had to call her doctor, who sedated both women.

Patricia Highsmith blamed her tense adult relationship with her mother on Mary's jealousy over her female friends and lovers.

Patricia Highsmith's mother broke off relations with Highsmith by letter in 1974, and lived in a nursing home from 1975 until her death in 1991.

In 1941 Patricia Highsmith met Rosalind Constable, a 34-year-old British journalist and literary consultant.

In 1943 Patricia Highsmith had a brief affair with artist Allela Cornell who killed herself three years later over another failed relationship.

Patricia Highsmith, nevertheless, felt guilty over her death and prominently displayed Cornell's oil portrait of her in all her homes.

Patricia Highsmith began a year-long affair with the rich socialite Virginia Kent Catherwood in June 1946.

Patricia Highsmith's name was Kathleen Senn and the encounter inspired Highsmith to begin writing The Price of Salt.

In March 1956, Patricia Highsmith began a relationship with Doris Sanders, an advertising illustrator and copywriter.

Patricia Highsmith left Sanders in December 1958 after initiating an affair with another woman.

The relationship was stormy and after six months Patricia Highsmith moved to another house in New Hope.

Patricia Highsmith did likewise in her novel The Cry of the Owl.

Patricia Highsmith had an affair with the woman and fell in love.

Patricia Highsmith moved to England in 1963 to be closer to her lover and she eventually settled in Earl Soham, Suffolk in 1964.

Patricia Highsmith was radicalized by the Spanish Civil War and joined the Young Communist League while at Barnard in 1939.

Patricia Highsmith was a swing voter, voting for the Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984, Republican George Bush senior in 1988, and independent Ross Perot in 1992.

Patricia Highsmith described herself as a liberal or social democrat but admired Margaret Thatcher because of her policy of tax cuts and wrote that she would not sacrifice any of her money to help the poor.

Patricia Highsmith believed that people were responsible for their destiny and that society was not to blame for the problems of individuals.

Patricia Highsmith prohibited her books from being published in Israel after the election of Menachem Begin as prime minister in 1977.

Patricia Highsmith dedicated her 1983 novel People Who Knock on the Door to the Palestinian people:.

Patricia Highsmith donated money to the Jewish Committee on the Middle East, an organization that represented American Jews who supported Palestinian self-determination.

Patricia Highsmith expressed racist and prejudiced views about other social groups, including black Americans.

Patricia Highsmith believed that black people were responsible for a welfare crisis in America and spoke of their "animal-like breeding habits".

Patricia Highsmith was called a misogynist by some critics and some of those who knew her.

When young, Patricia Highsmith was influenced by the religious views of her mother, who was a Christian Scientist.

Patricia Highsmith rejected Christian Science at the age of 21 but still retained a belief in God.

Patricia Highsmith was outraged at human cruelty to animals, such as battery chicken farming.

Patricia Highsmith disliked dogs and admitted to secretly kicking a neighbor's dog that she thought was misbehaving.

The novel introduces major themes in Patricia Highsmith's work including the complementary nature of good and evil, an implied homoerotic attraction between male antagonists, and shifting identities.

In what BBC 2's The Late Show presenter Sarah Dunant described as a "literary coming out" after 38 years of disaffirmation, Patricia Highsmith finally acknowledged authorship of the novel publicly when she agreed, in 1990, to its republication by Bloomsbury under the title Carol.

Patricia Highsmith's themes were influenced by Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the existentialism of Sartre and Camus.

Especially in her view of American men, Patricia Highsmith subverted many of the ideological bases of the suburban ideal.

Patricia Highsmith mostly wrote in the third-person singular from the point of view of the main character who is usually male.

Patricia Highsmith was usually classified as a crime, suspense or mystery writer in the United States, whereas in Europe she was considered a psychological or literary novelist.

Several of Patricia Highsmith's works have been adapted for other media, some more than once.