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23 FEB

We celebrate the 100th anniversary of Praticia Highsmith’s birth

Do you know this suspense author? Patricia Highsmith was a master and a revolutionary of the noir genre who challenged with her life and work the traditional morality.
We celebrate the 100th anniversary of Praticia Highsmith’s birth

Was the author of classics of the noir fiction like Strangers on a traint and The talented Mr. Ripley, she would have turned 100 on the 19-01-2021.

Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth (Texas), but she grew up in New York where she moved when she was little girl. She was trained to be a writer at the University of Barnard College and she also belonged to the artistic group of writers called Yaddo in which she was invited by Truman Capote.

Highsmith who lived in the bohemian neighbourhood of Greenwich Village, still to this day fascinates because of the depth of her character, lesbian but homophobic, misogynist, pessimist and macabre as well as being racist and antisemitic other than the historical context she lived in.

She was also a cat lover and a snail breeder as well as an amateur carpenter. She had many affairs both with men and women. She was solitary, nocturnal, lesbian, sensitive, a troublemaker and a taciturn person.

She apparently enjoyed making antisemitic and racist comments to scandalize, causing hatred towards her.

I am now cynical, quite rich, alone, depressed and absolutely pessimistic”, she wrote on her diary on January 1970.

Despite all those inner conflicts, writing saved her.

Her novels are absorbing and macabre and similarities between the author and their protagonists can be easily found. She was a true revolutionary who defended the seduction of evil and created an ambiguous, unsettling, and attracting universe where the human being revolves around guilt, lies and crime. Highsmith’s most appealing aspect is her reputation of being an enigma a question mark.

Her novels are not standard crime fiction, which usually includes a puzzle about who committed the crime or clearly delineates the limits between good and evil. She likes scandalize the reader making him or her feel uneasy about not just why the reader is reading her book it but also why he or she is enjoying it”. Told Richard Bradford researcher and professor in English literature if the University of Ulster and author of her biography Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires. The Life of Patricia Highsmith published by Bloomsbury editorial on the day of her anniversary.

Her work is vast, with more than 40 novels, books, and short stories from which we can highlight:

  • The Heroine, published in 1946, won the O. Henry Prize for the best short story.

  • Strangers on a train, nominated to the Edgar Prize 1951 for best novel.

  • The Price of Salt published in 1952 pen-name Claire Morgan y republished 37 afterwards (in 1989) with the title Carol.

  • The talented Mr. Ripley, nominated to the Edgar Prize in 1956 for the best novel and winner of the Grand prix de littérature policière in 1957.

  • The Terrapin, nominated to Edgar Prize for the best short story in 1963.

  • The Two Faces of January, winner of the Silver Dagger Prize in 1964 for the best foreign novel.

  • Ripley Under Ground, published en 1970, is the second novel of the "Ripley" series.

  • Eleven, also known as The Snail-Watcher and Other Stories, a book of short stories published in 1970, which won the Prize of black humour in 1975.

  • Ripley's Game, published in 1974, is the third instalment of the "Ripley" series

  • The Animal Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, s book of short stories published in 1975.

She was also awarded the award Grand Master, Swedish Crime Writers' Academy in 1979, the Prix littéraire Lucien Barrière, at the Festival du Cinéma Américain of Deauville in 1987, the Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, from el Ministry of Culture of France in 1990, the Best Foreign Literary Award, from the Finnish Crime Society in 1993 the Greatest Crime Writer, from The Times in 2008.

Patricia Highsmith died in 1995 in Switzerland age 74.

Her three most famous books, Strangers on train, The talented Mr. Ripley and Carol can be found on an special edition on this link.

 

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