Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of The Journalist and the Murderer, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, and In the Freud Archives.
Malcolm is best known for the 1991 lawsuit triggered by In the Freud Archives, when psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued Malcolm and The New Yorker for $10 million, after claiming that Malcolm had fabricated explosive quotations attributed to him. After several years of proceedings, the court found against Masson.
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles." The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."
