Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath

Parallel Lives covers the century from the birth of Sigmund Freud in 1856 to the death of Sylvia Plath in 1963. Written by the esteemed biographer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers, the book includes European, American, and Russian authors and artists, film directors and actors, children and soldiers, friends and lovers, rivals and enemies. Drawing on the bifocal principle of dual composition in Plutarch, these brief lives are arranged in pairs to interact with each other and illuminate their subjects’ similarities, characters, and friendships.

The linked structure of Parallel Lives allows several major figures--Sigmund Freud, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Seamus Heaney--to appear in multiple chapters. The most violent friendship ended when Verlaine shot Rimbaud and went to prison, and Rimbaud crawled back from Africa to die miserably in France. The most brilliant friendship broke up when Wilson attacked Nabokov’s edition of Alexander Pushkin. The most moving connection was Audrey Hepburn’s tender and sympathetic attachment to her soul-sister Anne Frank. Using mirror images reveals a new way to perceive these illustrious men and women.

Each chapter shifts the focus back and forth between two subjects, comparing them, changing perspective, reevaluating similarities and contrasts. With vivid details and dramatic events, Meyers emphasizes the backgrounds, intellectual influences, and personality traits of his paired subjects. By examining the complex motives for irrational behavior ranging from deep affection to intense hostility, warm encouragement to bitter rivalry (sometimes together in the same chapter), Parallel Lives offers insights into the dynamics of complementary characters.

Jeffrey Meyers, one of twelve Americans in the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of fifty-six books on biography, art, film, and literary criticism. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published on six continents. He has received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters honoring exceptional achievement. In 2012, he gave the Seymour Lectures in Biography at the National Libraries of Australia.