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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
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68/99
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68/99
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About This Book
Relegated during her lifetime to the pulpy genre of mystery, Patricia Highsmith has emerged since her death in 1995 as one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal). Presented for the first time, this one-volume assemblage of her diaries and notebooks—posthumously discovered behind Highsmith's linens and culled from more than 8,000 pages by her devoted editor, Anna von Planta—traces the mesmerizing double-life of an artist who "[worked] like mad to be something."Beginning in 1941 during her junior year at Barnard, the diaries exhibit the intoxicating "atmosphere of nameless dread" (Boston Globe) that permeates classics such as Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. In her skewering of McCarthy-era America, her prickly disparagement of contemporary art, her fixation on love and writing, and ever-percolating prejudices, the famously secretive Highsmith reveals the roots of her psychological angst and acuity. In one of the most compulsively readable literary diaries to publish in generations, at last we see how Patricia Highsmith became Patricia Highsmith.
Reviews
"Devotees and historians alike will linger over every morsel."
"Highsmith is pointed and dry about herself and everything else."
"In between are years of turmoil and heartbreak consistent with a truism about diaries: that you never write down the happy stuff."
"Sure to be a resource for future scholars, these annotated diaries will also appeal to fans of Eileen Myles's Chelsea Girls and Diane di Prima's Recollections of my Life as a Woman, offering a frank and detailed account of a woman and writer coming of age."
"The early diaries were written in several languages so that they had to be transcribed and then translated back into English."
"And read them you must."
"As she ages, she grows more bilious, her political views more unhinged ..."
"Judiciously edited ..."
"Although von Planta cautions that the volume is not an autobiography, it is surely the closest that readers will come to one ..."
"Her public self is at the mercy of the currents of popular culture."
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