Janet Flanner

Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and pioneering narrative journalist[4] who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.

Along with her longtime partner Solita Solano, Flanner was called "a defining force in the creative expat scene in Paris".

Two years later, she returned to her native city to take up a post as the first cinema critic on the local paper, the Indianapolis Star.

It was based on this connection that Harold Ross offered Flanner the position of French Correspondent to The New Yorker.

[5] After these early years spent in Pennsylvania and New York in her mid twenties, Flanner left the United States for Paris.

This organization fought for women to preserve their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone.

[6] 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.

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.

She also introduced them to crime passionel and vernissage, the triumphant crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by pilot Charles Lindbergh[15] and the depravities of the Stavisky Affair.

[16] 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."

[18] She covered the Suez crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the strife in Algeria which helped the rise of Charles de Gaulle.

In 1932 Flanner fell in love with Noël Haskins Murphy, an American singer who lived in a village just outside Paris.