Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen, before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense, and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith?

Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith's monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals "Pat" at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native's adventurous twenties, ?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life-rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers-with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader's edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of "our greatest modernist writers" (Gore Vidal).