Notable Pairings

Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

Plath's intense inner life and relentless self-examination, combined with Hughes's disciplined craft and attention to the natural world, produced a brief and combustible literary partnership. Her journals document admiration for his technique. His Birthday Letters, published thirty-five years after her death, document what the rupture cost him.

Robert Browning & Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Browning's dramatic monologue and psychological complexity, together with Elizabeth's emotionally direct love poetry, produced a Victorian partnership in which intellectual force and warmth were carried by different people. Her Sonnets from the Portuguese remain the clearest statement of what the relationship meant to her. He escaped a sad house with her, and she escaped a worse one.

Winston Churchill & Clementine Churchill

Churchill's defiant public engagement with adversity and Clementine's sustained private counsel and frank correction produced a marriage that was also an operational unit. She told him when he was wrong; he resisted her and was usually right that he had been wrong. A letter she wrote warning him he was becoming harsh and contemptuous reached him during the war, and he changed his conduct.

Napoleon Bonaparte & Josephine de Beauharnais

Napoleon's relentless drive toward conquest and Josephine's social grace and warmth produced a pairing in which ambition and charm served each other, until the political requirement of an heir dissolved a marriage he continued to mourn. He divorced her and married an Austrian archduchess. His last word was reportedly her name.

Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton

Taylor's passionate aliveness and Burton's literary intelligence and bardic self-conception produced a pairing that was operatic in scale. They married twice, appeared in eleven films together, and conducted their relationship as though it were itself a performance requiring a large audience. He called her the ocean and the tide, and meant it as something beyond a compliment.

Bob Dylan & Joan Baez

Dylan's restless philosophical searching and Baez's insistence on music as political instrument and moral witness represented two different answers to the question of what art was for. She introduced him to the folk world and championed him when no one else did. He outgrew the political frame she placed him in, and she spent the rest of her career working out what to do with that.

Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Elton's theatrical energy and emotional immediacy, combined with Bernie's lyrical depth, produced one of popular music's longest songwriting partnerships. The words and the music are written separately, in different rooms, on different continents, across a collaboration spanning fifty years. The combination produced something neither element would have become on its own.

Mick Jagger & Keith Richards

Jagger's performance energy and Richards's uncompromising musical code produced the core of the Rolling Stones. Richards writes riffs with a principled sense of what is and is not honest rock music; Jagger delivers them with a performer's complete commitment to the moment. Their creative partnership survived fifty years and a publicly documented mutual contempt that apparently coexists with something else.

John Lennon & Yoko Ono

Lennon's restless questioning and Yoko's conceptual art as activism produced a partnership that was as much philosophical as musical. She radicalized his politics; he gave her access to mass culture. Bed-ins for peace were a genuinely strange idea and they committed to it with complete seriousness. The collaboration was impossible to separate from the relationship.

Richard Rodgers & Oscar Hammerstein II

Rodgers's musical adaptability and Hammerstein's insistence on storytelling with genuine moral weight produced the defining partnership of American musical theater. Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music required both: the integration of serious theme and irresistible melody. They disagreed about which was serving which, and the disagreement was productive for sixteen years.

Paul Simon & Art Garfunkel

Simon's literary lyrical intelligence and Garfunkel's ability to make a song feel like a private confession produced a sound more emotionally direct than either would have been alone. The Sound of Silence required Simon's words and Garfunkel's voice in equal measure. They have been unable to agree on this for sixty years.

Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau

Emerson's Transcendentalist philosophy and Thoreau's determination to actually live it produced a relationship in which the thinker and the practitioner kept testing each other. Thoreau built his cabin on Emerson's land. When someone asked Thoreau what he was doing in jail for refusing to pay taxes, Emerson asked what he was doing not in jail.

Winston Churchill & Franklin D. Roosevelt

Churchill's defiant refusal to accept defeat and Roosevelt's strategic institution-building combined the moral force that made resistance imaginable with the material and organizational capacity that made it successful. Churchill provided the language; Roosevelt provided the ships. Each needed the other to be credible.

Bill Gates & Paul Allen

Gates's competitive drive and systematic business execution, combined with Allen's curiosity and technical vision, produced the founding of Microsoft. Allen saw what software would become and brought Gates the idea. Gates built the company that got there first. Allen was forced out in 1983 and spent the rest of his life pursuing everything else he was curious about.

Larry Page & Sergey Brin

Page's focus on scale and relentless execution, combined with Brin's mathematical curiosity and delight in unsolved problems, produced a founding partnership whose product was both an engineering breakthrough and a business. Brin developed the ranking algorithm as a dissertation project. Page saw what it could do at a billion times the scale and built a company around it.

Michael Jordan & Scottie Pippen

Jordan's singular competitive drive and Pippen's selfless defensive excellence and willingness to subordinate individual recognition to collective outcome produced six championships neither would have won alone. Jordan was the reason opponents prepared differently. Pippen was the reason it worked when they did.