Patricia Highsmith wrote comic books for years before Tom Ripley made her name
Before she created Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith spent 1942 to 1949 writing comic-book scripts she privately dismissed as hack work. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, was snapped up by Alfred Hitchcock for $6,000. Graham Greene called her the poet of apprehension, and Europe ended up buying her books more eagerly than America did.
Her birth name was Mary Patricia Plangman; she arrived on January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas, nine days after her parents, both commercial artists, divorced. In 1927 she joined her mother and stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, in New York. By nine she was absorbed by the case histories in Karl Menninger's The Human Mind, and letters she sent home from a summer camp in 1933 appeared in a magazine two years later, earning her $25. A year back in Texas with her grandmother she remembered as the saddest of her life. At Barnard College, which she entered in 1938, she edited the literary magazine.
After graduating in 1942 she was turned down by glossy magazines and ended up at the comic publisher Sangor–Pines, earning up to $50 a week, then freelanced, including wartime scripts for Timely Comics under editor Vincent Fago from 1943 to 1946. Her agents urged cheerier stories; she refused. Reading Camus' The Stranger in 1946 impressed her, and a stay at the Yaddo retreat in 1948, on Truman Capote's recommendation, helped her finish Strangers on a Train. Harper & Brothers took it in May 1949, it appeared in March 1950, and Hitchcock's film followed in 1951.
Her second novel, The Price of Salt, came out under a pen name in 1952 and broke ground by portraying a lesbian love affair sympathetically and letting it end happily. A trip to Positano supplied the setting for The Talented Mr. Ripley, published in December 1955, about a young American who murders a wealthy compatriot in Italy and takes over his life. It won the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll. She disliked the moralising ending of the French film version, Plein Soleil.
She settled in Europe in February 1963, living in Suffolk, then France from 1967 and Switzerland from 1982. The Two Faces of January won the British Crime Writers' Association's Silver Dagger for best foreign novel of 1964, and her agent thought Europeans liked the way she upended American crime conventions. Across 22 novels, five of them about Ripley, her work inspired more than two dozen films. She died on February 4, 1995, of aplastic anemia and lung cancer. Her antisemitic, racist and misanthropic remarks keep her reputation contested.
Source: Patricia Highsmith
