Reading Order
The Talented Mr. Ripley Reading Order
Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) is the first novel in the Ripley series, following Tom Ripley, a charming and resourceful young American sent to Italy to retrieve a friend of his acquaintance — and who instead kills him and assumes his identity. One of the great literary thrillers, equally influential as a study in amorality and as a portrait of postwar American anxiety.
Where to start
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Complete The Talented Mr. Ripley Book List
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The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith·1955·Tom's first murder, first identity assumption, first escape — the essential starting point. Anthony Minghella's 1999 film with Matt Damon is superb. - Buy
Ripley Under Ground
OptionalPatricia Highsmith·1970·Tom, now settled in France, is drawn back into crime through an art forgery operation — the direct sequel, fifteen years later, equally compelling. - Buy
The Tremor of Forgery
OptionalPatricia Highsmith·1969·Not a Ripley novel — a standalone Highsmith about an American writer in Tunisia who may or may not have killed a man; considered by many to be her best work. - Buy
Ripley's Game
OptionalPatricia Highsmith·1974·Tom recruits an innocent man for a murder — the third Ripley novel and arguably the most morally disturbing. - Buy
Deep Water
OptionalPatricia Highsmith·1957·Vic Van Allen allows his wife's lovers to disappear — a standalone Highsmith that reads as a more domestic version of the Ripley premise.
The Talented Mr. Ripley — Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to read the Ripley books in order?
The Talented Mr. Ripley stands completely alone and is by far the best entry point. The four sequels — Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley's Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991) — can be read in any order after the first, but their relationship to each other is loose and character-based rather than plot-based. Each novel finds Ripley in a different situation, usually involving murder, and they are unified by character rather than by a continuous narrative. Many readers love only the first novel; others find the sequels equally compelling.
Is Tom Ripley a sociopath?
Tom Ripley is one of literature's most studied examples of a character who appears to have no conscience — he kills without remorse, lies without discomfort, and experiences other people primarily as instruments of his desires or obstacles to his comfort. Highsmith herself described him as a "charming killer" and said she found writing him more congenial than writing her victims, which is both disturbing and illuminating: she identified with Ripley's detachment more than with the ordinary emotional lives of those he harms. Whether he would meet a clinical definition of antisocial personality disorder (the DSM's term for what was once called sociopathy or psychopathy) is less interesting than the literary question: what does it mean that readers like him, root for him, and find his moral emptiness seductive?
What is the significance of Italy in The Talented Mr. Ripley?
Highsmith lived in Europe for most of her adult life (she emigrated from the United States in the 1960s), and her relationship to Italy — its beauty, its historical richness, its class structures, its relationship to American tourists — is central to the novel. Italy represents everything Tom Ripley wants and does not have: beauty, culture, ease, the kind of life available to those with money. Dickie Greenleaf (the man Tom kills) has this life simply by virtue of his wealthy American background; Tom, who grew up poor and socially marginal, has had to invent himself. The novel is partly about what American outsiders project onto European culture, and partly about the violence hidden beneath that projection.
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