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The first and highly anticipated biography of the author of such classics of suspense as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The life of Patricia Highsmith was as secretive and unusual as that of many of the best-known characters who people her "peerlessly disturbing" writing. Yet even as her work - her thrillers, short stories, and the pseudonymous lesbian novel The Price of Salt - have 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, journalist Andrew Wilson mined the vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters that Patricia Highsmith 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.
Andrew Wilson is a journalist who 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.
Whitbread Prize Nominee

Patricia Highsmith, the celebrated author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, was renowned as a suspense writer during her lifetime, and in recent years a revival of her chilling and highly original body of work has brought her even wider recognition. She was notoriously evasive about both the sources of her fiction and her private life. But with her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of diaries, notebooks, and letters extraordinary in their candor and detail.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, into an unhappy marriage, Highsmith saw herself as an outsider even as a child. She was fascinated by Edgar Allan Poe and the case histories in Dr. Karl Menninger's The Human Mind, and by her teenage years she was exploring similar dark psychological themes in her own writing. As a college student in New York City and throughout her life, she conducted a series of passionate affairs with women who often also served as mentors or muses—many of whom speak here about Highsmith for the first time. Yet these romances were always more alluring in the ideal than in reality, and Highsmith found her greatest lasting happiness in her work.

Using Highsmith's intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of this veiled figure, an author described by Graham Greene as "the poet of apprehension" and by Gore Vidal as "one of our greatest modernist writers." From Texas, Wilson follows Highsmith's trail to New York, Italy, England, France, Germany, and her final resting place in Tegna, Switzerland. With this remarkable book, he illuminates Highsmith's creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death, finally allowing the full portrait of this compelling, contradictory woman to emerge.
"There is nothing quite so satisfying as a big fat biography that is well told. Andrew Wilson gives us a book bulging with history, cultural commentary, and extraordinary access to a writer's diaries and letters—not to mention the testimony of countless witnesses to Patricia Highsmith's life . . . [This is] a bravura performance that seduces us into relishing all the confidential and secretive aspects of [that] life . . . Mr. Wilson triumphs not only as Highsmith's biographer but as The Biographer, showing us why we read biography: It is, in the right hands, a continuation not only of the writer's life but of her work."—Carl Rollyson, The New York Sun

"Well-researched . . . [An] admirable biography."—Robin Updike, The Seattle Times

"[Beautiful Shadow] is as haunting and as chilling as the stories and novels Highsmith crafted over more than 50 productive years . . . Highsmith's work has had an important impact on both crime fiction and gay and lesbian fiction, and Wilson has impressively documented that as well as the tremendous cost Highsmith paid for her achievements."—Publishers Weekly

"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

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