Biography
Book Details

Two Lives

Gertrude and Alice

Janet Malcolm

From the acclaimed author Janet Malcolm

Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's stunning portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the brilliant and affable modernist master, and her brooding companion Alice B.

Opinion

'[Janet Malcolm] is among the most intellectually provocative of authors . . . able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight.'
David Lehman, Boston Globe

'Not since Virginia Woolf has anyone thought so trenchantly about the strange art of biography.'
Christopher Benfey

About this Title

Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's stunning portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the modernist master, and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she writes.

The portrait of their relationship that emerges is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat.

Janet Malcolm is at her finest in this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism.

About the Author

Janet Malcolm is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and Reading Chekhov, among other books. She writes for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and lives in New York City.

978-0-522-85436-7