Patricia Highsmith Patricia Highsmith Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 – February 4, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer best known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories throughout her career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing derived influence from existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene. Her first novel, "Strangers on a Train", has been adapted for
Carol M. Highsmith she immediately informed the Library's Prints & Photographs Division's curators that she intended to do likewise. Lange is remembered for her fieldwork for the federal Farm Security Administration among migrant workers and other dispossessed families during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Decades after Lange's work, Highsmith photographed surviving shacks in the Weedpatch "Okie" camp in Kern County, California, that was the setting for much of John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath". "Two hundred years from now, people might want to study what types of screws were sold, and they will be able to study my images and find