The Talented Miss Highsmith

A biography of the novelist who created Tom Ripley that is "both dazzling and definitive. . . as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject" (
Los Angeles Times).


A New York Times Notable Book * A Lambda Literary Award Winner * An Edgar Award Nominee * An Agatha Award Nominee * A Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week


Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of twentieth-century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her famed "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. Joan Schenkar maps out this richly bizarre life from her 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 an 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.



"Schenkar's writing is witty, sharp and light-handed, a considerable achievement given the immense detail." -Jeanette Winterson,
The New York Times Book Review


"This is no ordinary biography. . .
The Talented Miss Highsmith breaks much ground in connecting Highsmith's diabolical tales with the real women who prompted her strongest passions." -Janet Maslin,
The New York Times


"Captures the writer in all her sullen, sinister, ambivalent glory." -Tina Jordan,
Entertainment Weekly