Patricia Highsmith

(1921 - 1995)

After graduating from Barnard College in 1942, Patricia Highsmith wrote comics for Black Terror and Captain Midnight. “She traveled with snails in her luggage,” wrote Jeanette Winterson. “If she was bored at dinner parties, she might get a few snails out of her purse and let them loose on the tablecloth.” She died in 1995, leaving her estimated three-million-dollar estate to Yaddo, the artists’ community in upstate New York where she had completed Strangers on a Train.