The Price of Salt price paid by Lot's wife when she looked back towards Sodom. It's more likely, however, that she was invoking a biblical reference from the Gospel text () that André Gide included in his novel "The Counterfeiters", a work about the transgressive love of adolescence that Highsmith once took to heart: If the salt have lost his flavor wherewith shall it be salted?'—that is the tragedy with which I am concerned." Highsmith's publisher, Harper & Bros, rejected the manuscript. Her agent warned her that she was committing career suicide by following "Strangers on a Train" with a blatantly lesbian novel. It
The City and the Pillar of which is reinforced by the novel's epigraph from the Book of Genesis 19:26 "But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt." "The City and the Pillar" sparked a public scandal, including notoriety and criticism, not only since it was released at a time when homosexuality was commonly considered immoral, but also because it was the first book by an accepted American author to portray overt homosexuality as a natural behavior. The controversial reception began before the novel hit bookshelves. Prior to its even being published, an editor at EP Dutton said to