Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939

New York: The Viking Press, 1972. Fifth Printing. Hardcover. good/fair. 24 cm, xxiv, 232 pages, illus., index, DJ worn, soiled, creased, and torn, pencil erasure on half-title. Edges soiled. Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 - November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.[1] She wrote under the pen name "Genêt". She also published a single novel, The Cubical City, set in New York City. Flanner lived in New York City during World War II with Natalia Danesi Murray and her son William B. Murray, still writing for The New Yorker. She returned to Paris in 1944. Her New Yorker work during World War II included not only her famous "Letter from Paris" columns, but also included a seminal 3-part series profiling Hitler (1936), and coverage of the Nuremberg trials (1945). Additionally, she contributed a series of little-known weekly radio broadcasts for the NBC Blue Network during the months following the liberation of Paris in late August 1944. There is an iconic photograph of her sitting with Ernest Hemingway in the café Les Deux Magots taken shortly after the liberation. Flanner authored one novel, The Cubical City, which achieved little success.In 1948 she was made a knight of Legion d'Honneur. She covered the Suez crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the strife in Algeria which led to the rise of Charles de Gaulle. She was a leading member of the influential coterie of mostly lesbian women that included Natalie Clifford Barney and Djuna Barnes. Flanner lived in Paris with Solano, who put away her own literary aspirations to be Flanner's personal secretary. Even though the relationship was not monogamous, they lived together for over 50 years. Articles primarily selected from the author's Letter from Paris, originally published in the New Yorker. This series of articles written in Paris about people and places in the 1920's and 1930's was transmitted to the New Yorker under the pen name "Genet." Janet Flanner, writing as "Genet," was the resident Paris Correspondent for The New Yorker for many years. Her assignment was to write columns about "what the French thought was going on in France," but the result even now is to bring to life the Paris we thought belonged to Ernest Hemingway.