Patricia Highsmith

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised chiefly by her grandmother after her parents divorced weeks before her birth, Highsmith carried a cold, unsentimental sense of family dysfunction into everything she wrote. She trained as a comic-book scriptwriter in New York before her first novel, Strangers on a Train, caught Alfred Hitchcock's eye and became his 1951 film.

She published The Price of Salt, an unusually happy lesbian romance, under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952, not claiming authorship publicly for nearly forty years. Tom Ripley, the amoral con man of The Talented Mr. Ripley, proved durable enough to carry four sequels across three decades.

She spent her later life exiled in France and Switzerland, drank heavily, kept snails as pets, and cultivated a reputation for open misanthropy. She died in Switzerland in 1995, leaving a body of work that unsettled the crime genre's moral furniture.