Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith - Hardcover

Andrew Wilson

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582341982 ISBN 13: 9781582341989

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2003

Synopsis

The first and highly anticipated biography of the author of such classics of suspense as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" writing. Yet even as her work - her thrillers, short stories, and the pseudonymous lesbian novel The Price of Salt - have found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.
For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters that Patricia Highsmith left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers.

The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew Wilson is a novelist, biographer and journalist. He won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Biography (2004) and the LAMBDA Literary Award (2003) for Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith. He was shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize (2003) for the same book. His non-fiction books also include biographies of Sylvia Plath, Alexander McQueen, Harold Robbins and a group biography of the survivors of the Titanic. His first novel, The Lying Tongue, published in 2007, was shortlisted for the Jelf First Novel Award. He is the author of four novels which feature Agatha Christie as a detective. Writing under the pseudonym of E.V. Adamson, he is the author of the psychological thriller Five Strangers. He is also a creative writing mentor on the Gold Dust scheme and the new tutor on the Faber Academy crime course.

Reviews

While British journalist Wilson's portrait of Highsmith (1921-1995) is neither graceful nor fluid, it is as haunting and as chilling as the stories and novels Highsmith crafted over more than 50 productive years. The author of Strangers on a Train and five novels featuring the amoral and murderous Tom Ripley, Highsmith achieved considerable critical acclaim in her native United States, but never sold well here. She was better received in Europe and that was where she made her home. The biographer's exhaustive attention to detail coupled with his access to Highsmith's journals (or "cahiers," as she called them) and letters, and extensive interviews with her friends, lovers and associates, allow him to reveal in excruciating detail this very private person. Highsmith emerges as a woman of great intelligence, candor and curiosity, but also as a racially prejudiced, anti-Semitic and insensitive boor. She was an acute observer capable of seizing a single incident and transforming it into a complex story. But she was unable to transform her own unhappy life. Instead she transmuted her troubles, her experiences, her observations into her work. One of her lovers observed, "If she hadn't had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics' home.... She was her writing." Highsmith's work has had an important impact on both crime fiction and gay and lesbian fiction, and Wilson has impressively documented that as well as the tremendous cost Highsmith paid for her achievements. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582341982
• ISBN 13: 9781582341989
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 534