Patricia Highsmith "Mademoiselle", "Good Housekeeping", "Time", "Fortune", and "The New Yorker". Based on the recommendation from Truman Capote, Highsmith was accepted by the Yaddo artist's retreat during the summer of 1948, where she worked on her first novel, "Strangers on a Train". Highsmith endured cycles of depression, some of them deep, throughout her life. Despite literary success, she wrote in her diary of January 1970: "[I] am now cynical, fairly rich ... lonely, depressed, and totally pessimistic." Over the years, Highsmith suffered from female hormone deficiency, anorexia nervosa, chronic anemia, Buerger's disease, and lung cancer. According to her biographer Andrew Wilson, Highsmith's
Strangers on a Train (film) the rights to the Patricia Highsmith novel for just $7,500 since it was her first novel. As usual, Hitchcock kept his name out of the negotiations to keep the purchase price low. Highsmith was quite annoyed when she later discovered who bought the rights for such a small amount. Securing the rights to the novel was the least of the hurdles Hitchcock would have to vault to get the property from printed page to screen. He got a treatment that pleased him on the second attempt, from writer Whitfield Cook, who wove a homoerotic subtext (only hinted at in the