Today is the birthday, in 1892, of Janet Flanner. She was an American writer and pioneering narrative journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975. She wrote under the pen name “Genêt“. She was a prominent member of America’s expatriate community living in Paris before WWII. Along with her longtime partner Solita Solano, Flanner was called “a defining force in the creative expat scene in Paris”. She returned to New York during the war. Flanner split her time between there and Paris until her death in 1978.
After a couple years at the University of Chicago and a stint at the Indianapolis Star, she moved to New York and was in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table, but was not a member. She also met the couple Jane Grant and Harold Ross and Ross offered Flanner the position of French Correspondent to The New Yorker. Ross famously thought Flanner’s pen name “Genêt” was French for “Janet”. Flanner and Grant had been members of the Lucy Stone League which fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone.
Flanner was a prominent member of the American expatriate community in Paris 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, and Jean Cocteau, and the Ballets Russes dance company.
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 in 1936 profiling Hitler. Flanner covered the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker. She covered the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the strife in Algeria which helped the return to power of Charles de Gaulle.
Flanner at Les Deux Magots, during the liberation of Paris, 1944, with Ernest Hemingway
Whose stupid idea was this?????
I’m not surprised…
There’s a lesson here somewhere…
Today is the birthday, in 1949, of American singer Donald York the original vocalist for the rock and roll and doo-wop revival group Sha Na Na. After gaining initial fame for their performance at the Woodstock Festival, made possible with help from their friend Jimi Hendrix, the group hosted Sha Na Na, a syndicated variety TV series that ran from 1977 to 1981. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isvK4PzeA4c
