Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), was one of many young authors who benefited from their residence at Yaddo to complete significant work on their first novel. During her 1948 stay, she polished what would be her brilliant 1950 debut Strangers on a Train, the dark tale of two men who meet during travel, and hatch a plan to swap mutually beneficial homicidesâa spouse for a parent. This tale might seem to play out some of Highsmith's own dark fantasies, for she was raised by a mother who claimed she wished she'd never had her, and a stepfather with whom Highsmith was alternately combative and complicit. But in fairness, crime was in the air in 1948. That year saw the release of such classic films noir as Key Largo, and The Naked City. Dorothy Hughes had just published In a Lonely Place and Cornell Woolrich published his masterpiece, Rendezvous in Black. No institution did more that year to nurture this most American of literary genres than Yaddo, hosting, in addition to Highsmith, Chester Himes and Flannery O'ConnorâHimes who would go on to write the Harlem Detective novels, O'Connor who was poised to pen "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."