Patricia Highsmith's "The Glass Cell" Exploring Life After Incarceration, First Edition 1964
First Edition
[Prison and Incarceration][Literature] Highsmith, Patricia . The Glass Cell. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1964. First edition. Original unclipped pictorial dust jacket/ Stated “First Edition” on copyright page. Ex-library copy from Camden County Free Library with DISCARD stamp and date stamps to front and back end pages.A first edition of Patricia Highsmith’s psychologically intense prison novel The Glass Cell, exploring the corrosive effects of incarceration and moral betrayal, and published during a pivotal period in her career. Highsmith, best known for her creation of Tom Ripley and for The Price of Salt (Carol), which remains a landmark of lesbian literature, brings her fascination with identity, deviance, and criminal psychology to this singular study of post-carceral alienation. The narrative centers on Philip Carter, an engineer falsely imprisoned for fraud, who emerges from six years of brutal confinement to find himself estranged from his wife, child, and former self. The novel’s depiction of psychological damage and social isolation dramatizes what the dust jacket describes as “a slow, insidious erosion of mind and soul.” Notably, the text includes subtle implications of homoerotic longing and destabilized masculinity which reflect Highsmith’s broader themes of sexual ambiguity and psychological doubling. These motifs mirror Highsmith’s own experience as a closeted lesbian navigating the literary world of the Cold War era, imbuing the novel with an underlying queer tension even as it resists overt identification. Jacket is bright and intact with light wear to edges. Discard stamps and library markings on endpapers and title page as noted. Binding sound and contents clean. Very good overall. A first edition from a queer writer whose influence on postwar psychological fiction remains foundational. An early Highsmith work marked by the repression and projection that would define her legacy.
Item #22429
Price: $225.00
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