Janet Clara Malcolm (1934–2021,) born Jana Klara Wienerová, was an American writer, journalist, and collagist. A staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, she wrote about the practice of journalism, art, and biography.
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to secular Jewish parents, Malcolm escaped to the U.S. shortly before World War II. Her family settled in New York City. She attended the University of Michigan.
Malcolm was the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981) and Freud Archives (1984.) Her The Journalist and the Murderer (1990,) a polarizing critique of her profession, argued that the truth was always subjective, fluid, and incomplete. It’s never buried conveniently like treasure, to be inquisitively discovered and faithfully recounted. This book became a mainstay of journalism-school curricula.
Malcolm’s Two Lives: Alice and Gertrude (2007) won the 2008 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her Forty-One False Starts (2014) was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Malcolm was also interested in the visual arts, particularly as a collagist and photographer. Diana and Nikon (1980) collected her photography pieces.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Janet Malcolm
Fidelity to the subject’s thought and to his characteristic way of expressing himself is the sine qua non of journalistic quotation.
—Janet Malcolm
Topics: Quotations
If you scratch a great photograph, you find two things; a painting and a photograph.
—Janet Malcolm
Topics: Photography
The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar.
—Janet Malcolm
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
—Janet Malcolm
Topics: Journalists, Journalism
The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the grieves and shames of others.
—Janet Malcolm
Topics: Journalism, Journalists
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