Khaysmit Patritsiya

Patricia Highsmith (born Mary Patricia Plangman) was an American writer who became famous for her psychological detective novels with a noir edge.

She was born on January 19, 1921, in Fort Worth, Texas. Her parents divorced several months before Patricia’s birth, and until the age of six she was raised by her grandmother. When she was six, she moved to New York to live with her mother and stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, both of whom were professional actors. Until the age of ten, Patricia did not know that Highsmith was not her biological father, and she did not meet her real father for the first time until she was twelve. The dramatic events of her childhood and youth largely determined the difficult course of the writer’s own life and were one of the reasons she never wanted to have a family of her own. “My mother turned my childhood into a little hell,” Highsmith said in one of her later interviews. “She loved no one: not my father, not my stepfather, not me.”

The young Highsmith had a rather strained relationship with her mother, often offended her stepfather, although later she often tried to win him over in disputes with her mother. According to Highsmith herself, her mother confessed that she had tried to terminate the pregnancy by drinking turpentine. Highsmith never became accustomed to such “love-hate” relationships, which haunted her until the end of her life and which she described in the story “The Terrapin” (about a boy who stabbed his mother to death). After studying at elementary schools in Texas and New York, Patricia entered Julia Richmond High School. She showed artistic talent in drawing and sculpture at a very early age, but Patricia wanted to become a writer. While studying at Barnard College in New York, she was editor of the student literary magazine. After graduating from college in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree in English, Highsmith attended Columbia University for a time and then began working. She changed jobs several times, wrote comic-book scripts, and worked as a saleswoman in a New York department store. Patricia wrote in the evenings and on weekends, and the story “Heroine,” written while she was still in college, was accepted for publication by Harper’s Bazaar and in 1946 was reprinted in an anthology of O. Henry Prize-winning stories.

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