Patricia Highsmith’s New York Years

Before she wrote nearly two dozen suspense novels about psychopaths, sad sacks, and untimely death, when she was a twentysomething party girl in Manhattan, Patricia Highsmith wanted to write a bildungsroman about making it in the city. In her notebooks and diaries from that time, she imagines “a novel about the twenty-year-olds. . . . The bewilderment, the discouragement, the groping, the doubt, the hopes, the uncertainty of any permanence whatever.” She muses soberly, youthfully, “This could have great significance with respect to the times—economic, politic, the war and the knowledge—latent and unconscious, that we ourselves do not govern ourselves, and therefore are at other people’s mercy, if any.” At other times, she wonders if perhaps sex will be her great literary theme.