Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Malcolm, Janet

Paperback

Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 0300143109
ISBN13: 9780300143102
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: Sep 1 2008
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.70
Language: English

Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography: the story of the mystifying relationship between the brilliant and affable Gertrude Stein and her brooding companion, Alice B. Toklas

Janet Malcolm deftly captures Alice B. Toklas's legendary 40-year partnership with the brilliant modernist Gertrude Stein in Two Lives, clearing up a few mysteries along the way--including how two Jewish women were able to survive World War II in their provincial French château with the help of a Vichy collaborator.--Vogue

Shrewd, humane, and beautifully written.-- John Gross, Wall Street Journal

How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis? Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness and thin, plain, tense, sour 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.

Also in

Literary Figures

View All