Janet Flanner

Background

Flanner, Janet was born on March 13, 1892 in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Daughter of Frances and Mary-Ellen (Hockett) Flanner.

Education

Student Tudor Hall, Indpls.

Career

In September 1925 Flanner published her first "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, launched the previous February, starting a professional association that lasted for five decades. She wrote under the pen-name "Genêt". Flanner had first come to the attention of editor Harold Ross through his first wife, Jane Grant, who was a friend of Flanner's from the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone. Flanner joined the group in 1921. Ross famously thought "Genêt" was French for "Janet".

Flanner was a prominent member of the American expatriate community which included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein – the world of the Lost Generation and Les Deux Magots. While in Paris she became very close friends with Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas.

She played a crucial role in introducing her contemporaries to new artists in Paris, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and the Ballets Russes, as well as crime passionel and vernissage, the triumphant crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by Charles Lindbergh and the depravities of the Stavisky Affair.

Her prose style has since come to epitomise the "New Yorker style" – its influence can be seen decades later in the prose of Bruce Chatwin. An example: "The late Jean De Koven was an average American tourist in Paris but for two exceptions: she never set foot in the Opéra, and she was murdered."

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 1944.

Flanner authored one novel, The Cubical City, which achieved little success.

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.

For Paris Journal, 1944-1965 she won the 1966 U.S. National Book Award in category Arts and Letters. Extracts of her Paris journal were turned into a piece for chorus and orchestra by composer Ned Rorem.

In 1971, she was the third guest during the infamous scuffle between Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer on the Dick Cavett Show, getting in between the two after a drunken Mailer started insulting his fellow guests and their host.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Paris Journal, 1956-1964

    (This portrait of a city and an era is drawn from the the ...)

• novel

  • 'JANET FLANNER'S WORLD: UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS, 1932-75'

    ('JANET FLANNER'S WORLD: UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS, 1932-75' [I...)

• Other Work

  • Janet Flanner's World: Uncollected Writings, 1932-1975

    (The pieces collected here include an early profile of Hit...)

  • Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939

    (In 1925 Flanner began her New Yorker “Letter from Paris,”...)

  • Men And Monuments (Da Capo Paperback)

    (From 1925 to 1978, Janet Flanner was the Paris correspond...)

  • The Cubical City

    (The Cubical City [Janet Flanner] on Amazon.com. *FREE* sh...)

Membership

Member National Institute Arts and Letters.

Connections

Father:

Frank Flanner

Her father co-owned a mortuary and ran the first crematorium in the state of Indiana.

Mother:

Mary

Sister:

Marie

Sister:

Hildegarde Flanner

Hildegarde Flanner (June 6, 1899-May 27, 1987) was an American poet, essayist, playwright and conservationist.

husband:

William "Lane" Rehm

In 1918 she married William "Lane" Rehm, a friend that she had made while at the University of Chicago. He was an artist in New York City, and she later admitted that she married him to get out of Indianapolis. The marriage lasted for only a few years and they divorced amicably in 1926. Rehm was supportive of Flanner's career until his death.

Friend:

Solita Solano

Flanner was bisexual. In 1918, the same year she married her husband, she met Solita Solano (Sarah Wilkinson). They met in Greenwich Village, and the two became lifelong lovers, although both became involved with other lovers throughout their relationship. Solita Solano was drama editor for the New York Tribune and also wrote for National Geographic. The two women are portrayed as "Nip" and "Tuck" in the 1928 novel Ladies Almanack, by Djuna Barnes, who was a friend of Flanner's. While in New York, Janet Flanner moved in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table, but was not a member. She also met the couple Jane Grant and Harold Ross through painter Neysa McMein. It was this connection that Harold Ross offered her the position of French Correspondent to the New Yorker.