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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
"It has been condensed from some 8,000 pages of material contained in fifty-six previously unpublished journals."
"Just like Highsmith's writing, which always flirted with the line between literature and entertainment, the self that emerges from her diaries is slippery ..."
"a fascinating and unprecedented look into the 'playground for [her] imagination' ..."
"The mixing of notebooks with selections from the diaries works well, providing parallel narratives, each casting light on the other, and Von Planta offers useful, short biographical introductions to the various sections."
"It is still, at nearly 1,000 pages, a whacking book."
"The publication of a document like Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks would be an event in the case of any major writer."
"By the early 1950s, Highsmith's flippancy is starting to erode, as the permissiveness of the war years gives way to the more socially conservative America of the day."
"An exceptional effort to make primary source material on one of America's best known mystery authors more accessible."
"Von Planta has thankfully omitted the most offensive of Highsmith's hateful outbursts."
"The resurrection of...little-known, charmingly monikered queer NYC boîtes provides its own ancillary pleasures; Highsmith's detailing of her evenings out serves as a kind of stealth history of midcentury homo nightlife ..."
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