Wineapple's first book is a meticulously researched biography of
"America's Tocqueville," the longtime Paris correspondent for The
New Yorker who never succeeded in establishing an identity for
herself outside the "Letter from Paris," signed "Genet." Flanner's
early years in and around Indianapolis - like so many other
expatriate Americans, she came from the Midwest - don't make for
gripping reading; and even when she meets the first of her
long-term lovers, Solita Solano (whom, together with Noel Murphy
and Natalia Murray, she was to depend on the rest of her life),
separates from her husband, moves to Paris, and begins writing for
the fledgling New Yorker, her story isn't any more interesting than
dozens of other Twenties memoirs. But when war comes to France,
destroying the civilization Flanner had always taken amusedly for
granted, forcing her to confront what she called her own
"cowardice" (she fled to America, leaving Noel behind), and
changing the focus of her letters and biographical profiles from
negligent gossip to sociopolitical reportage - she covered the
Nuremberg Trials and the Algerian crisis, wrote profiles of
Philippe Petain and Andre Malraux, and nearly broke with The New
Yorker over her defense of Kay Boyle against the witch hunters -
Wineapple's tone becomes less gossipy and more impassioned as well;
and although, like her subject, she tends to describe instead of
analyze, her trenchant conclusions about Flanner (whose use of an
"androgynous, anonymous" pseudonym "provided legitimacy" but "may
well have robbed her of her own voice") are cogent and moving. It's
probably appropriate that Flanner herself remains remote, unable to
define herself even for her biographer apart from her New Yorker
persona, in this thoughtful, absorbing portrait. (Kirkus Reviews)
For 50 years, under the pen-name of Genet, Janet Flanner described the political, artistic and social life of Paris after World War I. She knew and saw people and events from Edith Wharton to Ernest Hemingway, from Charles Lindbergh's landing to Josephine Baker's debut. She wrote of the culture, the celebrities and the scandals of Paris and the wider Europe, and profiled de Gaulle, Picasso, Malraux, Mann and Hitler for her New Yorker readers.;In Paris the American-born Flanner found the freedom to live and love as she chose, and her personal life was as passionate and complex as her public one. This book chronicles Flanner's lifelong relationship with Solita Solano and the turbulent love affairs of her later life.;A chain-smoking, hard-driven perfectionist, Janet Flanner won the 1966 US National Book Award for "Paris Journal". In this literary biography, Brenda Wineapple brings to life the intense, compelling woman who, sporting a monocle, came to be synonymous with the bittersweet romance of the Parisian Left Bank.
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