Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks: The New York Years, 1941-1950

First published in 2021 to great literary acclaim, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks "offer[ed] the most complete picture ever published of the canonical author (New York Times), its "astonishing candor . . . like nothing else in American confessional literature" (Joan Schenkar). Now, with this highly accessible and condensed paperback edition, focusing only on her formative years in Manhattan, new audiences can experience "one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City" (Dwight Garner, New York Times). Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native's adventurous young adult life in Manhattan, The New York Years provides an intimate psychological self-portrait of an impressionistic and ambitious artist afloat in Greenwich Village--before she penned her iconic characters. Laid bare in this perennial reader's edition are the bold, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of the great progenitors of twentieth-century American fiction.