The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

Joan Schenkar

St. Martin's Press, Jan 18, 2010 - Biography & Autobiography - 704 pages

Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling  as that of her favorite "hero-criminal," talented Tom Ripley. In this revolutionary biography, Joan Schenkar paints a riveting portrait, from Highsmith's 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 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.

What people are saying

Review: The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

User Review  - Jody - Goodreads

“She wasn't nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well would have called her a generous woman.”—from 'A Note on Biography', The Talented Miss Highsmith Where to start? I was consumed ...

Review: The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

User Review  - Craig - Goodreads

Pernicious and nosey as it sounds the attraction of a writer's private life and potential revelations about the same, will induce me to, and others, I'm sure too, 'stretch the binding' on what is ...

About the author

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

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith
• Author: Joan Schenkar
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2010
• ISBN: 1429961015, 9781429961011
• Length: 704 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Literary