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
Patricia Schartle Myrer In 1960 Schartle helped to revive the Gothic romance genre when she persuaded Eleanor Hibbert to write a new series of novels under the name Victoria Holt. In 1956 Schartle met novelist Mary Higgins Clark through a writer's workshop and became her literary agent for twenty years until her retirement. Schartle and Higgins Clark became such good friends that Higgins Clark named her fifth and last child "Patricia Mary" for their "winning combination". Patricia Highsmith appointed Patricia Schartle as her literary agent in 1959, when Schartle was with Constance Smith Associates. After Constance Smith Associates merged with McIntosh & Otis