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Cover of The Price of Salt

How long does it take to read The Price of Salt?

Patricia Highsmith

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith takes about 5 hours 4 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 5 hours 4 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1952. 276 pages, about 75,900 words.

11 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 26 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 5 hours 4 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 10 minutes

The page count is the median across 72 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

THE PRICE OF SALT is the famous lesbian love story by Patricia Highsmith, written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. The author became notorious due to the story's latent lesbian content and happy ending, the latter having been unprecedented in homosexual fiction. Highsmith recalled that the novel was inspired by a mysterious woman she happened across in a shop and briefly stalked. Because of the happy ending (or at least an ending with the possibility of happiness) which defied the lesbian pulp formula and because of the unconventional characters that defied stereotypes about homosexuality, THE PRICE OF SALT was popular among lesbians in the 1950s. The book fell out of print but was re-issued and lives on today as a pioneering work of lesbian romance.

Content warnings (AI-checked, may be incomplete)
  • sexual content

How these are chosen

Subjects: Fiction, Lesbians, Lesbian romance novel, Lesbian love story, Divorce, Child custody

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