Author: Patricia Highsmith

Highsmith published Strangers on a Train in 1950 and Hitchcock filmed it the year after, which set up a career she then spent mostly in Europe, moving between France, Italy, England and finally Switzerland. Tom Ripley, introduced in 1955, is a murderer the reader is invited to root for and who never faces consequences, an arrangement she found funny and reviewers found unsettling. The Price of Salt, a lesbian novel whose ending is not punishment, appeared in 1952 under a pseudonym because she refused the label that would have followed; she acknowledged it only decades later. Her diaries and notebooks, published after her death, record a sustained hostility to Jews and to other groups that hardened with age, alongside a stated preference for snails and cats over people. She drank heavily and died in 1995.