Patricia Highsmith and her ashes were interred in its columbarium. She left her estate, worth an estimated $3 million, and the promise of any future royalties to the Yaddo colony, where she spent two months in 1948 writing the draft of "Strangers on a Train". Highsmith bequeathed her literary estate to the Swiss Literary Archives at the Swiss National Library in Bern, Switzerland. Her Swiss publisher, Diogenes Verlag, was appointed literary executor of the estate. Highsmith was a resolute atheist. Although she considered herself a liberal, and in her school years had gotten along with Black students, in later years she became
Carol M. Highsmith 48 were Highsmith’s. For a documentary movie that accompanied the exposition, a crew followed Highsmith "on the road" in Clarksdale, Mississippi and elsewhere a year earlier, in 2017. The exhibit’s title was borrowed from a 1930 photograph in the national library’s collection of a rare, fluffy-feathered goose held by an actress at a Madison Square Garden poultry show, thought to be taken by an unnamed photographer in the employ of the Underwood & Underwood Co. that produced stereograph views. In what the Annenberg museum described as "a captivating conversation," Highsmith was the featured speaker at an "Iris Nights" lecture series