You Must Change Your Life

The extraordinary story of the one of the most fruitful friendships in modern arts and letters. In Paris in 1902, Auguste Rodin had just completed The Thinker; visiting from Prague was Rainer Maria Rilke, broke and with writer’s 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 Rilke’s years together as master and disciple, their heartbreaking rift and finally, their moving reconciliation. Rachel Corbett reveals how Rodin’s friendship led Rilke to write his most celebrated poems and inspired his Letters to a Young Poet. She captures the dawn of Modernism amid the characters that made up Rilke and Rodin’s circle, including Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Lou Andreas-Salome, George Bernard Shaw and Jean Cocteau. And she recounts the friendship of two artists whose work reverberates a century later.