“She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they
“She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.” – Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 – February 4, 1995), “The Price of Salt,” 1952 (picture: c. 1942).Patricia Highsmith, who was born ninety-six years ago today, was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for works later adapted for stage and screen, including “Strangers on a Train” (1950; film: 1951), “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (1955; film: 1999), and “The Price of Salt” (1952, republished as “Carol” in 1990; film: 2015).After a childhood marred by a mentally abusive mother, Highsmith endured deep depression throughout her life and struggled with chronic alcoholism that intensified as she got older. In her late twenties, she underwent months of psychoanalysis in an effort to “regularize herself sexually”; after ending the treatment, she accepted herself as a lesbian. Highsmith had few close personal relationships, and she had a reputation for being misanthropic and cruel. Among other things, she expressed racist and anti-Semitic views.Otto Penzler, Highsmith’s U.S. publisher, remembered that he “could never penetrate how any human being could be that relentlessly ugly…But her books? Brilliant.”“The Price of Salt,” which Highsmith first published under a pseudonym, was revolutionary in that it presented a lesbian love affair with a happy ending. As Highsmith wrote in the 1990 republication (retitled “Carol”): “The appeal…was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, or at least they were going to try to have a future together. Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by [killing themselves], or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell.”Patricia Highsmith died on February 4, 1995; she was seventy-four. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #PatriciaHighsmith -- source link
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