Genet, a biography of Janet Flanner

Abstract

A triumph...How Brenda understood Genet and her times is almost uncanny. She writes of them with clarity and accuracy in a style that is almost startling in its simplicity. (Kay Boyle). Wineapple has written a wonderfully perceptive and moving biography of Janet Flanner. I hated to finish it. (May Sarton). A good book to read at this time, with Europe once again undergoing kaleidoscopic change. At her best, Janet Flanner vividly described what we all must remember if history is not to repeat itself. (Newsday). strength of this book rests in the intelligence of its observations. The author never struts or postures as a pop psychologist. She never snips and reduces character so that portrait becomes caricature...Wineapple delivers this woman in the splendor of her complication. (Mirabella). An admirable biography of an interesting woman who did interesting work in interesting times. has done an exemplary job of weaving ...a narrative that is ...smooth as silk. (Trenton Times). 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 Genet. 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 Genet to reveal Flanner - no less vivid and complex than Stein, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, and other American expatriates who crossed her path.