This Prague native is a long-term contributor to “The New Yorker” and author of many books. She has practiced a post-modern style in which she often draws people’s attention and doubts about her role in the narrative. Whether even the most serious observer can be trusted.

“Every reporter who is not too stupid or too conceited to notice what is happening knows that his actions are morally untenable.” This is her beginning Reporter and Murderer. The 1990 book attacked Joe McGinnis’s true crime classic Fatal vision As the main case of the author deceiving his subject-the convicted killer Jeffrey McDonald.

Looking back at her selection of works in 2013, Forty-one false startsFor The New York Times, Adam Kirsch praised Malcolm for his “strong uniqueness and very interesting literary experience.”

“Most of the works in the book find that Malcolm observes the present (David Salle, Thomas Struth) or the past (Julia Margaret Cameron, Edith Wharton) Of artists and writers,” Kirsch wrote.

“But what the reader remembers is Janet Malcolm: her cool intelligence, her psychoanalytic skills, and her withdrawal can make her counterpart hang herself with her own words.”

On Thursday, “The New Yorker” editor David Remnick praised Malcolm as a “master of non-fiction writing” and expressed her willingness to accept challenges from her peers.

Remnick told the Associated Press: “Journalists may be one of the most superficial and complacent tribes. Janet sometimes dares to question what we do.”

Controversial career

Malcolm’s words — and the words she attributed to others — brought her respect, contempt, and prolonged litigation.

In 1983, she reported on Jeffrey Musayev Mason, the former director and psychoanalyst of the Sigmund Freud Archives in London. She said that Mason called himself a “knowledgeable dancer” and vowed that he would be called “the greatest analyst of all time” and would turn Freud’s hometown into a “place of sex, women and fun.”Her report is now in “The New Yorker” and is the basis of the book published in 1984 In the Freud Archives.

Mason sued for US$7 million in compensation for five quotations that were fabricated and ruined his reputation. The case lasted for many years. The Supreme Court of the United States allowed her to be tried, and Malcolm testified that she could not find a notebook to record some of his remarks, which made her very suspicious.

In 1994, a federal court jury in San Francisco ruled that she was not guilty of defamation, although it determined that she fabricated two quotations. The jury found that the quotations were wrong and could be defamatory, but Mason failed to prove that she acted deliberately or recklessly.

A year later, facing a new round of suspicion, Malcolm announced that she had found the missing notebook while playing with her granddaughter.

“I don’t believe it,” Mason said at the time. “This is the adult version of’Dog Eats My Homework’.” Except in this case, the dog regurgitated the notes after 12 years. “

Malcolm’s honors include the 2008 PEN Biography Award Two lives: Gertrude and Alice, And was nominated by the National Book Critics Association in 2014 Forty-one false starts. Ranking of Modern Libraries of American Book Publishing Imprint in 1999 Reporter and Murderer Ranked 97th in its list of the 100 best non-fiction works of the 20th century.

Her other books, most of which were edited by her second husband Gardner Botsford, include The Silent Woman: Silvia Plath and Ted Hughes with Psychoanalysis: Impossible Career.

Malcolm was born in Jana Wienerova in 1934. Five years later, after the Nazis annexed Czechoslovakia, he immigrated to the United States with his family. Her parents changed the last name to Winn.

At the University of Michigan, she met her first husband, Donald Malcolm, who later became the writer of The New Republic and The New Yorker. After getting married in 1959, Janet Malcolm moved to the East and occasionally published film reviews in “The New Republic” and a poem in “The New Yorker”, but in addition, she spent several years raising her daughter.

Donald Malcolm died in 1975. Her second husband, Botsford, died in 2004.

Breakthrough in The New Yorker

Malcolm’s breakthrough occurred in 1966, when she wrote an article about children’s books for The New Yorker, which impressed the editor William Sean, and he finally gave her a column about furniture . She quickly expanded her subject and changed her approach.

“When I first started doing a long-form live report, as the New Yorker claimed, I modeled my’me’, the New Yorker’me,’ using images of stocks, civilization and humanity as models, but As I progressed, I started to mend her and change her personality,” she told Paris Review in 2011.

“Yes, I gave her faults and vanity, and perhaps most importantly, strong opinions. I let her stand aside. I was influenced by what is called deconstruction in the air,” she added. “The idea I got from it was the idea that there is no such thing as a calm observer, and every narrative is affected by the prejudice of the narrator.”