The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith
Joan Schenkar
List price £16.99
Product Details
- Format:
- Paperback
- ISBN:
- 9780312363819
- Published:
- 03 Jan 2011
- Publisher:
- Picador USA
- Dimensions:
- 704 pages - 235 x 156 x 31mm
Categories:
Patricia Highsmith, one of the greatest writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favourite "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.
JOAN SCHENKAR is the author of "Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde "as well as a collection of plays, "Signs of Life: 6 Comedies of Menace. "She lives in Paris and Greenwich Village.