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Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
by Andrew Wilson
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9781582344119 |
Only 1 left in stock at $9.95!
Awards
2004 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" thrillers and short stories. Yet even as her work has found new popularity in the last few years, the life of this famously elusive writer has remained a mystery.
For Beautiful Shadow, the first biography of Highsmith, British journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters she left behind, astonishing in their candor and detail. He interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers. But Wilson also traces Highsmith's literary roots in the work of Poe, noir, and existentialism, locating the influences that helped distinguish Highsmith's writing so startlingly from more ordinary thrillers. The result is both a serious critical biography and one that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman, one who despite her acclaim and affairs always maintained her solitude.
Review:
"Perhaps no one 'can document a life in all its richness,' but Wilson has come close, getting at Highsmith from a number of angles and showing the splinters of identity in his subject that she herself found so captivating." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"[A] thorough, extensively researched, dispassionate account of [Highsmith's] complex life, and [Wilson's] analysis of how her personality affected her books...is accurate and illuminating." Alice K. Turner, The Washington Post Book World
Review:
"[N]either graceful nor fluid, [but] as haunting and as chilling as the stories and novels Highsmith crafted....Wilson has impressively documented [Highsmith's impact] as well as the tremendous cost Highsmith paid for her achievements." Publishers Weekly
Review:
"Wilson achieves the detachment required to document Highsmith's bizarre personal habits...while still appreciating the intellectual and emotional insights she had to give." Elise Harris, The New York Times Book Review
Review:
"[M]arvelously insightful....This is the best kind of literary biography, doing honor to its subject and all her warts, exactly as Highsmith would have wished." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"[F]ascinating, beautifully balanced and meticulously researched...telling us as much as we are ever likely to know about Highsmith the woman and bringing us as close to understanding the writer as we are ever likely to get." P.D. James, Sunday Telegraph (UK)
Review:
"[An] exemplary biography of a tortured, difficult and outstandingly gifted human being....Wilson has fashioned a biography that does complete justice to her uneasy spirit." Sunday Times (London)
Review:
"Masterly, utterly absorbing....The beauty of Wilson's biography lies in his recognition that...[Highsmith] had the courage, skill and industry to turn unspeakable angst into transcendent entertainment." Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday (UK)
Review:
"[A] commendable biography of a most complex contrarian....Wilson's greatest strength is to show how Highsmith was able to manipulate her profound contradictions into high popular art." Douglas Kennedy, The Times (London)
Review:
"An absorbing and terribly sad book...sometimes, it was in the small...detail in this book by Andrew Wilson that one felt one had glimpsed the very odd imagination of the person who wrote those marvellous books." A.N. Wilson, Evening Standard (UK)
Review:
"Andrew Wilson does sterling work....[A] fascinating, depressing read about a brilliant, tragic woman." Natasha Walter, Guardian (UK)
Synopsis:
Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters Highsmith left behind, interviewed her closest friends and colleagues as well as some of her many lovers to create this serious critical biography that reveals much about a brilliant and contradictory woman who, despite her acclaim and affairs, always maintained her solitude.
About the Author
Andrew Wilson has written for most of Britain's national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Daily Mail. This is his first book.
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Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781582344119
- Subtitle:
- A Life of Patricia Highsmith
- Author:
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Bloomsbury USA
- Location:
- New York
- Subject:
- Women
- Subject:
- Lesbians
- Subject:
- Authors, American
- Subject:
- Suspense fiction
- Copyright:
- 2004
- Edition Number:
- Reprint ed.
- Publication Date:
- April 2004
- Binding:
- TP
- Language:
- English
- Illustrations:
- Y
- Pages:
- 304
- Dimensions:
- 7.66x5.10x1.42 in. 1.06 lbs.
