Janet Flanner (1892–1978)

Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. After a period spent traveling abroad with her family and studies at Tudor Hall School for Girls (now Park Tudor School), she enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1912, leaving the university in 1914. In 1916, she returned to her native city to become the first drama and art critic for the Indianapolis Star. In 1922, she settled in Paris with her companion Solita Solano, and lived there, writing as the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker (except for a gap during World War II) until almost the end of her life. She used the pen name Genêt. She became a prominent member of the American expatriate community that 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. Flanner played a key role in introducing the American public to new artists in Paris, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and the Ballets Russes, as well as places such as Les Deux Magots café and events such as the Stavisky Affair.
Her writing came to epitomize the "New Yorker style." 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 also was the author of one novel, The Cubical City (1926).