A study of the cultural impact of Janet Flanner, better known as Genêt, the overseas correspondent of The New Yorker magazine for fifty years
The New Yorker’s Paris studies the cultural impact of Janet Flanner, better known as Genêt, the overseas correspondent of The New Yorker magazine for fifty years (1925-1975). From the creativity of the Jazz Age before World War II to France’s political, social, and economic modernization after the war, Flanner’s bimonthly “Letters from Paris” column kept her American readers abreast of developments in the City of Light. Her witty, wry, well-crafted columns helped her audience understand Parisians, not only in their glamorous and cultured sophistication, but in their complex, often contradictory European context.
Curious readers learned, in real time, how France lost and regained its way during the bulk of the twentieth century. In her own fashion, Flanner reframed the stereotypes that Americans had of the French during World War II, but also long afterwards, as France, a NATO ally, charted an independent course between Russia and the United States during the Cold War.
Although Paris was Flanner’s post, she did not limit herself to reporting events in the French capital. Her challenge to American imaginaries included other countries in Europe, particularly pre-war Britain and post-war Germany and Italy. Consequently, Flanner was as much a European correspondent as she was a veritable historian in her journalistic practice. She was, and still is, worth reading for the breadth and depth of her best work, available in several collected works and in her papers at the Library of Congress. Her journalism set a new standard for foreign correspondents, and she was subsequently honored with the National Book Award in 1966 for a lifetime of scrupulous reporting and carefully crafted prose. The legacy of her insights reverberates among reporters exploring many of the same cultural tropes today, not just in The New Yorker but also in long-format journalism everywhere.
