A poet of disquiet and obsessive desire, Patricia Highsmith (1921–95) specialized in psychological thrillers staged in an amoral, irrational, Cold War universe. Her best‐known literary creation is Tom Ripley, the cheery, charismatic psychopath and consummate performance artist who debuted in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), the first in a series of five Ripley novels (the Ripleiad) that spanned Highsmith's career. Highsmith's literary output was prodigious: 22 novels, seven short story collections, and a meditation on her generic bread‐and‐butter, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966). Her first published novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), was quickly adapted in Alfred Hitchcock's famous 1952 film, and Highsmith's cold and fascinating fictional world has spawned a host of cinematic adaptations by prestigious European auteurs like Claude Chabrol, René Clement, and Wim Wenders. Recently, Highsmith has been rediscovered not just as a quintessential noir novelist but also as a shrewd analyst of “perverse” desire and its Cold War production, and an unsparing explorer of the fluidity of modern identity at mid‐century.

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Nathanael West (1903–40), novelist, screenwriter, and one of the funniest and most despairing satirists of the twentieth century, published only two novels and two novellas, yet his critical esteem has risen sharply since his death at the age of 37. In the charged political climate of the 1930s, West's books, as he put it, seemed to “meet no needs except [his] own.” They were too bleak for leftist radicals, too mired in the world of consumer culture for highbrow critics, too crude for the popular press. Today, however, West's fiction – with its canny attention to the psychological dynamics of mass and consumer culture; its devastating skepticism about American nationalism, nativism, and naive folksiness; its avant garde deployment of nihilistic humor in the service of social critique; and its deft borrowing of the forms, cliches, and idioms of American popular culture – is as fresh and relevant as ever. As a shrewd analyst of the politics of sentiment, as a Hollywood writer, and as a late modernist obsessed with the status of America‐as‐simulacra, West has also proven a crucial figure in the broad reassessment of literary modernism over the last decade, which has proven more hospitable to “bad” modernisms that challenge the high modernist caricature of aesthetic arch‐seriousness.

Justus Nieland (Michigan State University) offers a reading of the domestication and death of Chaplin's silent persona in his 1947 sound comedy, “Monsieur Verdoux”, and its consequent refashioning of comic feeling. In the film, the Tramp, modernity's most public person, is killed by satire, polished smooth and supplanted by an inhuman character - both a dandy and a serial killer of women. Nieland offers a reading of the transition between the silent, universal Tramp and noisy and particular Verdoux.