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Book Cover
E-book
Author Malcolm, Janet

Title Two lives : Gertrude and Alice / Janet Malcolm
Published New Haven : Yale University Press, ©2007

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Description 1 online resource (229 pages) : illustrations
Contents CONTENTS -- PART ONE -- PART TWO -- PART THREE -- Notes -- Illustration Credits
Summary '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. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work 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."Two Lives" is also a work of literary criticism. 'Even the most hermetic of Stein's writings are works of submerged autobiography', Malcolm writes. 'The key of "I" will not unlock the door to their meaning - you need a crowbar for that - but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion'. Whether unpacking the accessible "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", in which Stein 'solves the koan of autobiography', or wrestling with "The Making of Americans", a masterwork of 'magisterial disorder', Malcolm is stunningly perceptive
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references
Notes English
Print version record
Subject Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946.
Toklas, Alice B
SUBJECT Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946 fast
Toklas, Alice B. fast
Stein, Gertrude 1874-1946 gnd
Toklas, Alice B. 1877-1967 gnd
Stein, Gertrude. swd
Toklas, Alice B. swd
Subject Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography
Americans -- France -- Paris -- History -- 20th century
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY -- Literary.
LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General.
Americans
Authors, American
Intellectual life
Författare -- Förenta staterna -- 1900-talet -- biografi.
Amerikanskor -- Frankrike.
Amerikanska kvinnliga författare -- 1900-talet -- biografi.
Amerikaner -- historia -- Frankrike -- Paris -- 1900-talet.
SUBJECT Paris (France) -- Intellectual life -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85098066
Subject France -- Paris
Paris -- intellektuellt liv -- historia -- 1900-talet.
Genre/Form Biographies
History
Biographies.
Biographies.
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780300137712
0300137710
9786611735166
661173516X