“Writing, of course, is a substitute for the life I cannot live,” Patricia Highsmith wrote in a diary entry from 1950. Were she Jane Austen or a Brontë sister, this might be a romantic statement.

Patricia Highsmith was a prolific self-chronicler.The author of "Strangers on a Train," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and roughly two-dozen other novels and works of short fiction kept diaries ...

Patricia Highsmith is a tricky subject for biography, though British academic Richard Bradford is the third in 18 years to try. Tricky, because Highsmith’s behavior could be as creepy and ...

Patricia Highsmith in 1991: "she declared that if she came upon a famished infant and a starving kitten, she would not hesitate to feed the latter and leave the child to fend for itself".

In his groundbreaking new biography, “Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith,” Richard Bradford outlines the contradiction that was Patricia Highsmith “the woman ...

Joan Schenkar begins her biography of author Patricia Highsmith with a warning: “She wasn’t nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well would have called her a generous woman ...

Joan Schenkar's new biography of mystery writer Patricia Highsmith, "The Talented Miss Highsmith," chronicles the seedy side of Highsmith's life at the expense of her genius as an author.

The much-anticipated “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks” hits bookstores — and the mailboxes of those wise enough to pre-order — on Tuesday. The 999-page volume includes ...

Joan Schenkar, the author of an acclaimed biography of the writer Patricia Highsmith, in New York in 2009. She took a reporter on a tour of places where Ms. Highsmith had lived and loved.

Most people who have heard of the American novelist Patricia Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth in 1921 and lived much of her life in Europe, dying in Switzerland in 1995, will have done so ...

JOAN SCHENKAR: I backed into it, really. I have always been interested in women who go too far — and Highsmith went further than anyone. And the fact that writing about her would keep me in ...