Notable Pairings
Famous pairings mapped to the sixteen values, showing how different types work together.
Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre
De Beauvoir's application of existentialist thought to women's condition gave Sartre's philosophy a political consequence it had previously lacked. Their decades of productive disagreement sharpened both bodies of work considerably.
F. Scott Fitzgerald & Zelda Fitzgerald
Scott's literary ambition and Zelda's reckless aliveness were mutually generative and mutually destructive. He drew on her letters and diaries for his fiction; she found the arrangement intolerable. The Jazz Age they personified consumed both of them, and the question of which of them was the writer never got a clean answer.
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.
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.
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.
Martin Scorsese & Robert De Niro
Scorsese's cinema of moral complexity and spiritual anguish, combined with De Niro's total physical and psychological preparation, produced eight films in which the director's vision found its fullest embodiment and the actor found material that justified his method. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull. The collaboration has never been fully replicated by either with anyone else.
Leonard Cohen & Marianne Ihlen
Cohen's sustained examination of love's spiritual weight and Ihlen's warmth and generous presence gave him the stability from which he wrote some of his most enduring early work. Their relationship lasted years; their friendship lasted decades. His letter to her as she was dying in 2016, telling her he would follow soon, is perhaps the finest thing he ever wrote.