Highsmith, Patricia | Highsmith's High Spot, inscribed from "Pat"

Highsmith, Patricia

Strangers on a Train. New York: Harper, 1950

8vo. Publisher's blue-lettered cloth in original dustjacket. Edges faded, more so at spine ends; some creasing to extremities, chipping at top of jacket spine panel with spine title faded, folds rubbed and closed tear to rear panel.

A warmly inscribed copy of the first edition of the author's first novel, "Dear Jose, I really wish I lived in your house entirely - with love, Feb. 5 1959 Pat." 

A chance meeting results in a complex exchange of murders, memorably adapted by Alfred Hitchcock.

José García Villa, to whom the book is inscribed, was born in Manila in 1908, before moving to New Mexico to pursue his studies, and ultimately to Greenwich Village in New York City. There, he joined a community of modernist poets, including e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, among others, and was affectionately known as "The Pope of Greenwich Village." He wrote his poems under the pseudonym Doveglion (a composite of dove, eagle, and lion) and was admired, according to Marianne Moore, for "the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems." His 1933 story collection, Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was "the first work of fiction by a Filipino writer published by a major United States-based press."

Villa received “numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Philippines Heritage Award, a Poetry Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and a Shelley Memorial Award. In 1973 he was named a National Artist of the Philippines, and he also served as a cultural advisor to the Philippine government. He died in New York City on February 7, 1997.”

REFERENCE

Academy of American Poets; Villa, Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen

PROVENANCE

José García Villa (presentation inscription)