Strangers on a Train.

"How easy it was to lie when one had to lie": First Edition of Patricia Highsmith’s First Book; Inscribed by Her

Strangers on a Train.

HIGHSMITH, Patricia.

$11,000.00

Item Number: 1519

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950.

First edition of the author’s classic first book, basis for the classic Alfred Hitchcock film. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “For Margaret avec plaisir Patricia Highsmith.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket that shows some of the endemic fading to the spine panel. Jacket design by Irv Doktor. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. Rare and desirable signed and inscribed.

"For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith" (Time). The success of Strangers on a Train allowed Highsmith to quit "hack" writing for magazines and devote her energies full time to fiction. "Her books evoke a quiet tension, a persistent apprehension, which is all the more terrifying and suspenseful for its aura of plausibility" (Vinson, 643-44). It was adapted as a film in 1951, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Farley Granger and Ruth Roman.

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