Patricia Highsmith and the Postwar Literary Marketplace: The Middlebrow, Print Culture, and Canonisation

Abstract

Typically pegged as an author of suspense fiction or crime writing, this dissertation argues that engaging the material artefacts of Highsmith’s history in postwar print culture provides a lens onto the author’s forgotten middlebrow ambitions. Analysing Highsmith’s frustrated attempts to enter the booming postwar market for middlebrow fiction, it draws on resources typically underutilised by literary scholars: rejection slips and abridgements. Tracing her many failures and limited successes within the literary marketplace, the dissertation is also an attempt to understand how Highsmith’s canonisation has provided misleading narratives about the author that overlook her investments in middlebrow culture. It concludes by suggesting that any attempt to define the various cultural practices designated as middlebrow must remain incomplete until the links between print culture, the literary marketplace and canonisation have been carefully articulated.