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
The Price of Salt as "Carol" under Patricia Highsmith's name, with the addition of an afterword by her. Phyllis Nagy said Highsmith chose "Carol" because Highsmith, herself, "was Therese and the object of her desire wasn't herself...it was someone else." The novel was so personal to Highsmith that "it was difficult for her to take ownership of it as a writer for many years." The marketing of the novel in successive editions reflected different strategies for making the story of a lesbian romance attractive or acceptable to the reading public. The Coward-McCann dust jacket called it "A Modern Novel of Two Women". The paperboard