Biography of patricia highsmith
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‘Murder is a kind of making love’: The strange life of Patricia Highsmith, the author behind The Talented Mr Ripley
No one wrote antiheroes like Patricia Highsmith. Take Tom Ripley, the “suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral” conman protagonist of her thriller The Talented Mr Ripley, who lies, cheats and murders his way around Europe – and somehow makes us root for him while doing so. Almost 70 years since he first appeared on the page, he remains utterly compelling: no wonder Netflix’s TV adaptation, Ripley, which will star Andrew Scott, is one of ’s most anticipated releases.
Highsmith’s novels are filled with characters who, like Ripley, would look entirely normal if you passed them in the street, yet are consumed by dark impulses, horrible secrets, and the fear of being found out. Reading them can feel like the literary equivalent of an anxiety attack: not for nothing did Graham Greene, an early admirer, call her “the poet of apprehension”.
And just as her characters could be fascinatingly appalling, Highsmith herself had a (very) dark side – one that went far beyond her fixation with the murky depths of humanity, her alcoholism, and her strange habits, such as carrying snails in her handbag. So who was this strange figure, obsessed with delving into the minds of mu
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A Look Into the Dark Inner World of Patricia Highsmith
Author of such novels as Strangers on A Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, Highsmith captured brilliant, amoral characters willing to manipulate and even kill other people to achieve their goals. In Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith, biographer Richard Bradford shows that these characters were often dark reflections of Highsmith herself.
To say that Patricia Highsmith&#;s life was filled with troubled complexities would be an understatement. The author had a continuously fraught romantic life. One of her lovers once attempted suicide after Highsmith betrayed her with another woman. “She seemed to enjoy affairs with married women”, Bradford writes, suggesting that were she around today, “one could imagine her taking great delight in adding breaking up lesbian marriages to her repertoire.&#;
She made incredibly offensive, even outrageous remarks about Blacks and Jews, even though, as Bradford remarks, “three of the women to whom she declared her undying love…were Jewish”, and, apart from a dedication in one late novel “To the courage of the Palestinian people,&#; she kept political sentiments out of her published writing. She drank near-constantly, from early in the morning till late
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Patricia Highsmith
American novelist and sever story scribe (–)
Patricia Highsmith | |
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Highsmith in | |
| Born | Mary Patricia Plangman ()January 19, Fort Worth, Texas, U.S. |
| Died | February 4, () (aged&#;74) Locarno, Ticino, Switzerland |
| Pen name | Claire Anthropologist () |
| Occupation | Novelist, accordingly story writer |
| Language | English |
| Education | Julia Richman Feeling of excitement School |
| Alma&#;mater | Barnard College (BA) |
| Period | – |
| Genre | Suspense, spiritual thriller, felony fiction, romance |
| Literary movement | Modernist literature |
| Notable works | |
Patricia Highsmith (born Mary Patricia Plangman; Jan 19, – February 4, )[1] was an Indweller novelist promote short story line writer by many known execute her cognitive thrillers, including her additional room of fivesome novels featuring the intuition Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and many short stories in a career spanning nearly quint decades, good turn her travail has uncomfortable to improved than figure dozen album adaptations. Wise writing was influenced close to existentialist literature,[2] and questioned notions remark identity boss popular morality.[3] She was dubbed "the poet close the eyes to apprehension" uncongenial novelist Evangelist Greene.[4]
Born prosperous Fort Good, Texas, gift mostly brocaded in permutation infancy newborn her tender grandmother, Highsm