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 120 Days of Sodom book into a film, "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom" ("Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma"). The film is transposed from 18th-century France to the last days of Benito Mussolini's regime in the Republic of Salò. "Salò" is commonly listed among the most controversial films ever made. Viscount Charles de Noailles, whose wife Marie-Laure was a direct descendant of de Sade, bought the manuscript in 1929. It was inherited by their daughter Natalie, who kept it in a drawer on the family estate. She would occasionally bring it out and show it to guests, among them the writer