Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941-1995. Liveright, 2021.
Edited by Anna von Planta.
Editor’s foreword, acknowledgments and chapter introductions translated by Elisabeth Lauffer. Annotations translated by Sophie Duvernoy and Elisabeth Lauffer. Highsmith’s foreign-language diary entries translated by Sophie Duvernoy (French & German), Hope Campbell Gustafson (Italian), Noah Harley (Spanish) and Elisabeth Lauffer (German).
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021
The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year
Excerpted in The New Yorker
Profiled in The Los Angeles Times
Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times).
Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read.
At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
An excerpt of the diaries was published in the New Yorker on Oct. 4, 2021: Portrait of the Author as a Young Woman.