Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith´s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City (Dwight Garner,-New York Times).
Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith?
Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith´s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals Pat at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native´s adventurous twenties,? The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life-rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers-with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader´s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of our greatest modernist writers (Gore Vidal).