You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin

In Paris in 1902, renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin had just completed The Thinker; visiting from Prague was the delicate Rainer Maria Rilke, broke and with writers block. When Rilke was commissioned to write a book about Rodin, everything changed. You Must Change Your Life tells one of the great stories of modern art and literature: Rodin and Rilkes years together as master and disciple, their heartbreaking rift, and finally their moving reconciliation. In a vibrant debut, Rachel Corbett reveals how Rodins friendship led Rilke to write his most celebrated poems and inspired his beloved Letters to a Young Poet. She captures the dawn of Modernism amid the fascinating characters that made up Rilke and Rodins circle, including Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Lou Andreas -Salome, George Bernard Shaw and Jean Cocteau. And she recounts the remarkable friendship of two extraordinary artists whose work continues to reverberate a century later.

Rachel Corbett is the editor in chief of Modern Painters. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Art Newspaper, New York magazine, and others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.