Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm was a staff writer for The New Yorker until her death in 2021. She began writing for The New Yorker in 1963 when the magazine published her poem “Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House.” Malcolm wrote About the House for nearly ten years, a column on interiors and design. From 1975 until 1981, she wrote a photography column. 

Malcolm contributed various pieces throughout her career, including Profiles, Reporter at Large articles, and book reviews. Malcolm’s books include “Diana and Nikon” (1980), her first collection of essays on photography. “Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession” (1981) is an expanded version of her Profile of the psychoanalyst Aaron Green, and “In the Freud Archives” (1984) is based on her two-part article on Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson.

“The Journalist and the Murderer” (1990), about a lawsuit brought by a convicted murderer against the author of a book on his crime, examines the relationship between writer and subject; it was first published in 1989 as a two-part article in the magazine. “The Purloined Clinic” (1992) is a collection of essays and criticism from The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. 

“The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes” (1994) explores the life and work of Sylvia Plath and is based on an article that originally appeared in the August 23 & 30, 1993, issue of The New Yorker. Malcolm explored the American legal system in “The Crime of Sheila McGough” (1999). “Reading Chekhov” (2001) weaves close readings of Chekhov’s works with scenes from the Russian writer’s life and her travels in Russia. 

In the fall of 2007, Malcolm published a book titled “Two Lives: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in War and Peace,” based on three articles she wrote about Stein and Toklas that appeared in the magazine. She published “Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers” in 2013 and “Nobody’s Looking at You: Essays,” her last book, in 2019. Malcolm was born in Prague and emigrated with her family to the U.S. in 1939.