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The Price of Salt (later republished under the title Carol) is a 1952 romance novel by Patricia Highsmith, first published under the pseudonym "Claire Morgan." Highsmith—known as a suspense writer based on her psychological thriller Strangers on a Train—used an alias as she did not want to be tagged as "a lesbian-book writer", The 2004 reissue by Norton appealed to highbrow tastes with the tagline "The novel that inspired Nabokov's Lolita " on the cover—a claim that stemmed from a theory by Terry Castle published in a 2003 essay for The New Republic. (The tagline was not included in subsequent editions.)
As a movie tie-in with the release of the 2015 motion picture adaptation of the novel, Norton published a new paperback edition as Carol with the subtitle "Previously Titled The Price of Salt", and the cover featuring the image of the North American theatrical film poster. The cover of the Bloomsbury tie-in edition featured the title Carol superimposed on a scene from the film with images of Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara from another scene, but did not include a reference to the original title.
Reception
200px|right|thumb|Patricia Highsmith on [[After Dark (TV series)#Patricia Highsmith|After Dark (June 1988)]]
The paperback version of The Price of Salt sold nearly one million copies before its new edition as Carol in 1990.
Adaptations
An unsuccessful attempt was made in the early 1950s to turn the novel into a movie. In the screen treatment the title was changed to Winter Journey and the character of "Carol" was changed to "Carl".
A radio adaptation titled Carol was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in December 2014 with Miranda Richardson as Carol Aird and Andrea Deck as Therese Belivet. It comprised five segments of approximately 15 minutes.
A 2015 British-American film adaptation of the novel, Carol, was directed by Todd Haynes from a screenplay by Phyllis Nagy. The film stars Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese. Carol was an Official Selection of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and won the Queer Palm award. The film received six Academy Award nominations, and nine British Academy Film Award nominations.
Social significance
Because of the happy (or at least, non-tragic) ending which defied the lesbian pulp formula, and because of the unconventional characters who defied stereotypes about female homosexuals,