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    A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley"
    A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley"
    A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley"
    Ebook50 pages52 minutes

    A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535839938
    A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley"

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      A Study Guide for Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr Ripley" - Gale

      08

      The Talented Mr. Ripley

      Patricia Highsmith

      1955

      Introduction

      The Talented Mr. Ripley is the first of five books in the Ripley series by Patricia Highsmith, an American writer who moved permanently to Europe in 1963. The series features her best-known character, Tom Ripley. Highsmith's suspense novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was first published in 1955 and was republished in 1999 by Vintage. The edition is out of print but second-hand copies are available. The book was also published in 1999 by Everyman in an anthology consisting of three of the Ripley novels, titled The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game. As of June 2007, this book is still available.

      The novel's themes include the nature of identity, the relationship of the real to the imagined, and homosexuality. Ripley literally gets away with murder and the innocent characters suffer in an amoral world that disconcerts the reader by subverting expectations. The novel exemplifies Highsmith's rejection of the honest, straight-talking hero of conventional crime fiction in favor of the morally compromised or criminal protagonist. The atmosphere of menace that Highsmith creates, with the relatively low level of actual violence, justify the English novelist Graham Greene's characterization of her in his Foreword to her short story collection Eleven as the poet of apprehension rather than fear.

      Author Biography

      Patricia Highsmith was born Mary Patricia Plangman in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 19, 1921, the only child of Jay Bernard Plangman, a graphic artist, and Mary Coates Highsmith, an illustrator and fashion designer. Highsmith's parents separated before she was born, and she was raised by her grandparents. At six years of age, Highsmith went to live with her mother and stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, in Greenwich Village, New York. She had an unhappy childhood and was not close to her mother. Highsmith was later to discover that when her mother was pregnant with her, she tried to abort the fetus by drinking turpentine.

      The young Highsmith showed talent in painting and sculpting, but she made up her mind to be a writer. She attended Julia Richman High School, New York City, where she edited the school newspaper and read books by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Charles Dickens. She was particularly intrigued by Karl Menninger's book, The Human Mind (1930), which featured case studies of kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, and serial killers, because she realized that seemingly normal people could be hiding extreme mental pathology. Highsmith continued her education at Barnard College, University of Columbia, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, and published short stories in the Barnard Quarterly.

      After graduating in 1942, Highsmith lived in Manhattan and earned a living by writing text for comic strips. In 1944, she was admitted to Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, based on recommendations by the writer Truman Capote and others. While at Yaddo she got engaged to a fellow writer, Marc Brandel, but broke off the engagement shortly before the wedding, ostensibly because of her fear of being a mother.

      Highsmith published her first novel, Strangers on a Train, a suspense thriller about a psychopath who commits what he hopes is the perfect murder, in 1950. The film director Alfred Hitchcock purchased the movie and stage rights for 6,800 dollars. The film was released in 1951. It proved a great success and Highsmith became famous overnight.

      Highsmith's second novel, The Price of Salt, appeared in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan (other

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