LA251 Left Bank Lit: "Paris Was Yesterday," by Janet (Genêt) Flanner

Few writers observed expatriate Paris with as much wit, elegance, and insight as Janet Flanner. Her collection Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 gathers selected pieces from her celebrated “Letter from Paris” column in The New Yorker, written under the pen name Genêt.

Living in Paris for decades, Flanner chronicled the city’s transformation from the exuberant café society of the 1920s through the political tensions and cultural upheavals of the 1930s. Her dispatches capture both the glitter and the gravity of the era—portraits of artists like Picasso and Colette sit beside reports on fashion, scandal, and the rise of fascism. With her cool, incisive style and cosmopolitan detachment, Flanner stands apart from her contemporaries on the Left Bank: neither romanticizing Paris like Hemingway nor mythologizing it like Barnes, but recording it as it was—vivid, contradictory, and alive.

Paris Was Yesterday offers an incomparable window onto the daily rhythms, personalities, and anxieties of a city—and a generation—on the edge of modern history.