The daughter of an Indianapolis mortician, Janet Flanner really began to live at the age of thirty, when she fled to Paris with her female lover. That was in 1921, a few years before she signed on as Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, taking the pseudonym Genêt. For half a century she described life on the Continent with matchless elegance.
Brenda Wineapple, an English professor at Union College, Schenectady, New York, goes beyond the mast of Genêt to reveal Flanner-no less vivid and complex than Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, and other American expatriates who crossed her path.