Janet Malcolm Biography | Author of The Journalist and the Murderer

The Journalist and the Murderer Author Biography

Malcolm was born in the 1930s to a Jewish family in pre-World War II Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her father was a psychiatrist. Because of rising anti-Semitism, the family left Europe in 1939 and settled in New York. Malcolm attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and went on to the University of Michigan. Malcolm wrote reviews for the student paper and worked as an editor for the university's humor magazine.

In the 1960s, Malcolm became a staff writer for the New Yorker, focusing primarily on interior decoration and design. By the 1970s she had branched out into writing about photography for the magazine. She published her first book, Diana and Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, in 1980. Ten of the eleven essays had originally appeared in the New Yorker, and many of her later books would also have their first publication in the magazine.