Patricia Highsmith Summary

The author of numerous short story collections and novels, including Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, American-born fiction writer Patricia Highsmith enjoyed greater critical and comm... Read more

Critical Essay by Marghanita Laski I used to be the only person I knew who loathed Patricia Highsmith's work for its inhumanity to man, but our numbers are growing and will be increased by [The... Read more

Critical Essay by Tom Paulin Alas, there's nothing revolutionary about Little Tales of Misogyny, a thin collection of failed fables in which various hairy, possessive or over-fecund women are m... Read more

Critical Essay by Lorna Sage [Slowly, Slowly in the Wind is] well up to Miss Highsmith's usual standard of nastiness, though perhaps more motley, not so insidiously interlinked as her last coll... Read more

Below, Champlin offers a positive review of The Black House. The Black House is a collection of stories by Patricia Highsmith, the Texas-born author long a resident in Europe. Like Ruth Rendell, she k... Read more

In the following review, Raskin offers a mixed assessment of Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes, commenting on Highsmith's "wry portrayals of human folly." The catastroph... Read more

In the following essay, the critic discusses Highsmith's five Tom Ripley novels, focusing on Ripley's matter-of-fact attitude toward crime. Through the years we have had the chance to fo... Read more

Hubly is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, she discusses how Highsmith's portrayal of artists in her novels advances such themes as identity, homosexuality, and the real ... Read more

In the following essay, Peters provides an overview of Highsmith's career, focusing on her fascination with death and murder, her lesbianism, and critical reaction to her work. "Sometime... Read more

Below, the critic offers a negative review of People Who Knock on the Door. Even good novelists occasionally have a lapse, and Patricia Highsmith had a very bad lapse of several hundred pages when she... Read more

In the following review, Hegi criticizes Highsmith's portrayal of women in Little Tales of Misogyny. Punishment is the central theme of this collection of stories about women that was first pub... Read more

In the following review, Ames praises Found in the Street. Found in the Street is a complex character study of New Yorkers brought together by chance. Elsie is a vivid, young waitress with the magneti... Read more