Tom Ripley

Thomas "Tom" Ripley is a fictional character in a series of crime novels by American novelist Patricia Highsmith, as well as several film adaptations. The character is an anti-hero, career criminal who supports himself as a con man and serial murderer. The five novels in which he appears—The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, and Ripley Under Water, published between 1955 and 1991—are referred to collectively as the Ripliad. 2In the novels Highsmith introduced Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) as a young man making a meager living as a con artist. The novel also supplies him with a back story: orphaned at age five when his parents drowned, he was raised in Boston by his aunt Dottie, a cold, stingy woman who mocked him as a "sissy." As a teenager, he attempted unsuccessfully to run away from his aunt's home to New York City before finally moving there at age 20. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, he is paid to go to Italy by Herbert Greenleaf, a shipbuilding magnate, to convince his son Dickie (a half-remembered acquaintance) to return to New York and join the family business. Ripley befriends the younger Greenleaf and falls in love with the rich young man's indulgent, carefree lifestyle; he also becomes obsessed with Greenleaf himsel