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
Carol M. Highsmith world of chauffeurs and house servants among the elite of Atlanta, Georgia. Her paternal grandmother, also named Sara McKinney, was a friend of Margaret Mitchell and other society women, she told Lamb. "We'd spend every day at someone's pool or country club," Highsmith said. "Opera played on the radio. Grandmother taught us manners and etiquette – to sit up straight, eat with our mouths closed, hold the soup spoon just so." Actually, Highsmith continued, her rural "granny" in North Carolina was wealthier than her refined grandmother in Atlanta. "Granny and Granddad owned a large and successful tobacco farm," Highsmith said.