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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995
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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
"But the truths of Highsmith's diaries have been, like those of Sydney's journal, transfigured by the fictions that preceded them."
"painstakingly annotated for context ..."
"Even these pages conceal with one hand what they display with another: 'It is curious that in the most interesting periods of one's life, one never writes one's diary.'"
"Published to coincide with the 100th centenary of Highsmith's birth in 1921, Diaries and Notebooks is a welcome addition to the work of a most eccentric genius."
"The city inspires some of the young Texan's finest writing ..."
"As she ages, she grows more bilious, her political views more unhinged ..."
"Misanthropes will find a lot to please them ..."
"a fascinating and unprecedented look into the 'playground for [her] imagination' ..."
"a portrait of Highsmith from the jolly solipsism of her 20s in New York—when, to read her diaries, you'd have had no idea the second world war was ongoing—to her sombre 50s and 60s, when she became increasingly bitter about the world and her life."
"Organized chronologically, the volume includes informative introductions for each section; a helpful foreword by von Planta; an afterword by Highsmith's biographer, Joan Shenkar, focusing on the influential women who featured in Highsmith's sensual education; a biographical timeline; a bibliography and filmography; and a sampling of passages that Highsmith wrote in Spanish, German, French, and Italian ..."
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