num_pages: 240
description: "How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?" Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography, criticism, and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is modernist master Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, the "worker bee" who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate "marriage." As Malcolm pursues the mystery of the couple's charmed life in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth.
language: English
title: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
titlecomplete: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
characters: Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein
genres: Writing, Womens, Nonfiction, Literature, World War II, History, LGBT, Biography Memoir, Biography, France
ratings_count: 810
awards: awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Lesbian Memoir/Biography, awardedAt: 1199174400000
name: The Publishing Triangle Award
category: The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
publisher: Yale University Press