Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose psychological thrillers are less concerned with solving crimes than with entering the unstable moral worlds of people capable of committing them. Her major works include Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt — later republished as Carol — and the five novels centred on Tom Ripley, beginning with The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955.

Highsmith’s fiction repeatedly collapses the distinction between respectable everyday life and violence, obsession or imposture, creating narratives in which guilt and identity shift between characters rather than settling into conventional moral categories. Her books have had an unusually durable relationship with cinema, beginning with Alfred Hitchcock’s adaptation of Strangers on a Train and continuing through multiple versions of the Ripley novels and Carol.