Patricia Highsmith born Mary Patricia Plangman ; January 19, β February 4, [ 1 ] was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers , including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories in a career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing was influenced by existentialist literature, [ 2 ] and questioned notions of identity and popular morality.
Born in Fort Worth , Texas, and mostly raised in her infancy by her maternal grandmother, Highsmith was taken to New York City at the age of six to live with her mother and stepfather.
After graduating college in , she worked as a writer for comic books while writing her own short stories and novels in her spare time. Her literary breakthrough came with the publication of her first novel Strangers on a Train which was adapted into a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was well received in the United States and Europe, cementing her reputation as a major exponent of psychological thrillers. In , Highsmith moved to England where her critical reputation continued to grow. Following the breakdown of her relationship with a married Englishwoman, she moved to France in to try to rebuild her life. Her sales were now higher in Europe than in the United States which her agent attributed to her subversion of the conventions of American crime fiction.
She moved to Switzerland in where she continued to publish new work that increasingly divided critics. The last years of her life were marked by ill health and she died of aplastic anemia and lung cancer in Switzerland in The Times said of Highsmith: "she puts the suspense story in a toweringly high place in the hierarchy of fiction. Her father had not wanted a child and had persuaded her mother to have an abortion. Her mother, after a failed attempt to abort her by drinking turpentine , decided to leave Plangman.
