Back in December 2008, I wrote about Patricia Highsmith’s work in comics, and how surprised I was never to have heard of it before. Now that I’ve gotten my hands on a copy of The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar, I don’t feel quite so ashamed of my ignorance.

Because that’s the way Highsmith would have wanted it.

It turns out she did her best to erase all evidence of her history in comics. And if she didn’t want me to remember her, why feel bad for not doing so?

Here’s what Schenkar wrote about that history:

Pat systematically erased from her life every single thing that had to do with comics; she threw away every comic script, every proposal for a comic script, and every scenario for a comic book story she ever wrote. There would have been thousands of pages of comics work to cull—and she culled every one of them,. Nor did she keep any copies.

It turns out that the only evidence Highsmith kept of her extensive comics work was by accident. On the back of a page of French vocabulary can be found these notes toward a story about the character The Golden Arrow. (more…)

In a recent Washington Post article about Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground, the reviewer mentioned in passing about the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley that “after graduating from Barnard, Highsmith supported herself writing for comic books.”

Am I the only one who did not know this?

I guess so, because according to Highsmith’s Wikipedia entry (and we all know that Wikipedia is never wrong):

Living in New York City and Mexico between 1942 and 1948, she wrote for comic book publishers, turning out two stories a day for $55-a-week paychecks. With Nedor/Standard/Pines (1942-43), she wrote Sgt. Bill King stories and contributed to Black Terror. For Real Fact, Real Heroes and True Comics, she wrote comic book profiles of Einstein, Galileo, Barney Ross, Edward Rickenbacker, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Isaac Newton, David Livingstone and others. In 1943-45 she wrote for Fawcett Publications, scripting for such Fawcett Comics characters as the Golden Arrow, Spy Smasher, Captain Midnight, Crisco and Jasper. She wrote for Western Comics in 1945-47.

So this seems to have been more than just a brief fling.

That information on the non-fiction narratives of famous people sounds very specific, so I’m assuming that I could track them down if I wanted to. But do we know exactly which issues of fictional superhero adventures she wrote? Those sound far more intriguing.

I can’t find this information online (well, maybe I could, but I’m not having much luck), so if anyone can point me in the right direction, please pipe up!