Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939

by Janet Flanner

In 1925 Flanner began her New Yorker Letter from Paris, from which most of the pieces in this collection are drawn. They give an incomparable view of French life before World War II.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, Essays, Travel, Biography, Memoir

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Janet Tyler Flanner was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.
She wrote under the pen name "Genêt". and published a single novel, "The Cubical City", set in New York City.

Reviews

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I bought this in the mid 70's I had never heard of Janet Flanner.
It was Paris that I was mad about.
Really enjoyed the book but took the writer for granted.
Here I got to know how the French behaved
between 1925 to 1939,
and gained many insights.
Janet turned out to be a whole world in herself.
But THAT took time.
Now I'm mad about Janet too !!!
And so reread these New Yorker articles with a totally different slant
- they are by a 'friend' I never got to meet
but can still meet constantly.
And I relish her insights.
Published in 1975 with a 17 page introduction by Janet,
-she was to die in November 1978 -
this was a book 'by her' and only indirectly 'about her'.

Move to 1998....
I saw advertised in the TV program on late night TV, around midnight(and this was to be a real case of the witching hour!!!) a show entitled "Paris was a Woman". Another travelogue!!!
I wearily turned it on out of Curiosity and Faithfulness
and stayed rivetted for the next amazing hour.
It was about Amazing Women who had lived in Paris in the 20's and 30's:
Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas, of course.
Then there was Natalie Barney, the American heiress, whose Knights of the Round Table were all ladies naturally, one of whom, a lover, Dorothy Wilde, was the handsome and witty niece of Oscar, and enjoyed appearing at costume parties dressed as her uncle.
Djuana Barnes, another American and writer, wrote a bawdy satire of the Barney salon; while Natalie herself, taking the title "L'Amazone" bestowed by her friend Remy de Gourmont, published "Pensees de l Amazone", a reflection on lesbian life and love.
This was just the pinnacle of a Very Large Iceberg...'hot' ice I'm sure
... and just another subclass of those who flocked to Paris to enjoy Life before the Economic Crash followed by a worse War sent everyone scuttling Home. Hemingway, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald and James Joyce were others.And there were hundreds more.
AND Janet Flanner was one of them !!!!
Janet cited as her reasons for abandoning America..."puritanism, materialism, hypocrisy and standardization"...adding, "leaving home was part of our sense of liberty...We wanted something we weren't getting."
And what a wonderful gravelly voice she had.
Not shy of attacking Hemingway, whose style, she assured us,
had been sourced from Gertrude Stein,
...and VERY faithfully.

Then, in the local library, came across a, Tome -
"Darlingissima", her wonderful correspondence with Natalia Danesi Murray.
What solid, intelligent, witty, humane, loving, informative epistles these are!!!
What an opus!!
This is where I really got to KNOW Janet.
Superb letters..an education, a revelation, a 'must' reread !!
Felt flat flat flat when I reached the end.

And later...MORE... a biography (1989) in a remainder bookshop...
"GENET...A Biography of Janet Flanner"by Brenda Wineapple,
- 'Genet' was the "nom de plume" for her New Yorker articles -
and I can only agree with May Sarton's "I hated to finish it."
My Cornucopia had dried up
...but seeing I had internalised it, THAT was no problem at all.
Within several months of finishing "Paris Was A Woman"
it only seemed very 'right' that I should find myself IN Paris,
searching out the addresses of Barney, Stein & Toklas, Proust, Colette, Hugo etc.,
meeting up with French friends and avoiding French fries.

I have yet to find Janet's National Book Award winning "Paris Journal 1944- 1965"
soon followed by her "Paris Journal 1965- 1971".
Life IS Goooood !!!

[Joel Fishbane · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's tempting to want to write about Janet Flanner the way she wrote about Paris, but I hope I'm wise enough to know that I'd die from the effort. Ms. Flanner's exquisite prose was a staple of the New Yorker for almost fifty years, writing dispatches from Paris that provided a glimpse into France's artistic, social and political scene. Paris Was Yesterday is a collection of these letters spanning most of the interwar years, from 1925 - 1939, and it's a work almost without peer. As a stylist, Janet Flanner is a marvel while her perceptive and wry take on all subjects, be it Ulysses or Hitler, makes for an engaging read.

According to Brenda Wineapple, Ms. Flanner's biographer, Janet Flanner herself was at least as colorful as the folks she wrote about - apparently she fled to Paris with her lover where they could live without fear of persecution. Although some famous names make it into this book - Hemingway, James Joyce, ,Mata Hari, Edith Wharton - there is true wonder to be found in her stylish essays on those obscure figures who once caught Parisian eyes. Screenwriters take note: there are nearly a dozen potential Hollywood blockbusters hiding in Ms. Flanner's annals of history, including such colorful figures as Lydia Stahl (an unassuming international spy), Jean de Koven (a murdered American tourist) and Marthe Hanau, a Bernie Madoff style schemer who Ms. Flanner called the "most inventive, brainiest, most convincing confidence woman modern France ever produced".

But it's Paris itself that is the real star, a city which celebrates art, proved an escape depot for American ex-pats and boasted a Lord High Executioner still known as "Monseiur de Paris". With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the city is headed into the terrors of WWII and Ms. Flanner's reveals the city itself had some inkling of it, although a year too early. In 1938, Parisians seemed terrified of war; but by the summer of 1939, there was confidence that "the European landscape can be clearly seen". Most wrenching is Ms. Flanner's own description of the city's conviction that war, if it came, would be an immediate disaster for Germany and that the Americans would be the first to send soldiers overseas.

Whether or not you can read Paris Was Yesterday in one sitting depends on how willing you are for your brain to skip quickly from one topic to another: the book may be an ideal travel companion, as it's lack of singular narrative means you can go days between chapters without missing a beat. But reading the book in one sitting may prove the more rewarding task. Although at first glance it is a disparate collection of stories about long forgotten celebrities, artists, criminals and politicians, as a book it emerges as a biography of a city and an era now forever gone.

[Trin · Rating 1 out of 5]

A cultural history of Paris from 1925-1939 by someone who apparently feels nothing but spite and scorn for almost every topic she chooses to write about. Well, it's finally happened: we've found writing too cynical even for me. I enjoy a good snark, but reading this book was frankly exhausting. (Flanner, I think, even eventually became exhausted: the collection does mellow a bit as it goes along.)

Then there's this description of Josephine Baker:

"She has, alas, almost become a little lady. Her caramel-colored body, which overnight became a legend in Europe, is still magnificent, but it has become thinned, trained, almost civilized. Her voice, especially in the vo-deo-do's, is still a magic flute that hasn't yet heard of Mozart -- though even that, one fears, will come with time. There is a rumor that she wants to sing refined ballads; one is surprised that she doesn't want to play Othello. On that lovely animal visage lies now a sad look, not of captivity, but of dawning intelligence."

Ew. Ew ew ew ew ewwwwwwww.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Janet Flanner's unique journal is addictive. The material in Paris Was Yesterday includes selections from Janet Flanner's fortnightly "Letter from Paris" in The New Yorker, which she started transmitting in 1925, signed . . . with her nom de correspondance, Genet. This is a book you must read if you have any interest in art, literature, music, French culture, European history of the late nineteen-twenties and thirties. Here is an excerpt from her notes on one of the greatest musicians of the century:
"With the death of Maurice Ravel, France has lost its greatest petit maitre of modern music. He was still a prodigy pupil at the Conservatoire when he composed two of the three works for which he was most famous--the "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte" and "Jeaux d'Euax," regarded as the most perfectly pianistic piece since Liszt. The hypnotic Iberian quality of "Bolero" is partially expained by his having been born at Ciboure, near the Spanish border."(p 181)
Reading the brief items I was continually impressed with the literary and philosophical references embedded in her prose. For example her note on Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles:
"Cocteau has always been a writer in the tradition of the great medieval mountebanks who worked with the charlatans of the Pont Neuf: as tightrope walker he gathers his crowd, and as soothsayer-dentist he pulls teeth and illusions, he dazzles and delights, and sells moon-powder guaranteed to cure any human ill--and truly cheap at the price."(p 60)

[Eric Byrd · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm in love with Flanner's tart scandal summaries and demimondaine obituaries:

The death in misery of La Goulue (1869-1929), one of the great demi-mondaines of the nineties, petted can-can dancer of the then devilish Moulin Rouge, model for Toulouse-Lautrec in some of his most famous cabaret canvases, and general toast of the whiskered town, afforded her a press she had not enjoyed since her palmiest days. She had charm, a dazzling complexion, and wit. It was the last great heyday for courtesans, and she made hay. Then came her fall. She went to jail after some lark. She became a lion-tamer in a street fair. She became a dancer in a wagon show. Then she became a laundress. Then she became nothing.A month ago she reappeared; fat, old, and dancing drunkenly in a few feet of a remarkable documentary film about the ragpickers of Paris--called, after their neighborhood of wagon shanties, 'The Zone.' A few weeks later her ragpickers took her to a city clinic, where she too died, murmuring as if declining a last and eternal invitation, 'I do not want to go to hell.'

[Eszter · Rating 4 out of 5]

what a joy! every time i read a line or a section that really tickled me, i would fold in the corner of the page, and by the time i was done, it looked like the top right-hand corner of the book had been lopped clean off. paying plenty of attention to the antics of both insane rich people and exciting bohemians, the tidbits included here worked together to paint a completely irresistible portrait of paris in the 20's and the 30's.

i can't help myself:

"the best of his classic aphorisms are still repeated as gospel today: 'to eat is a necessity, to eat well is an art.' 'dessert without cheese is like a pretty girl with only one eye.' it is said that he never talked during his famous dinner parties and went to sleep at table immediately after."

"years ago he had given a dinner in manhattan in honor of a monkey. this had given him no social standing in france."

"she was...the general toast of the whiskered town." (something to aspire to!)


i am keeping this picture from my pre-review because it would be a shame to take it down. really, janet flanner is just the coolest. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/wcf/image...

[Joel Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of articles that appeared in the New Yorker, written by an American correspondent living in France. Although the writing is about people and events more than 30 years ago, it is very interesting and entertaining for a number of reasons. First, it gives you a real sense of what Paris was like. Second, there are many items about events and people that are recognizable (such as Josephine Baker, James Joyce, Edith Wharton, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Ravel). Third, the reporting of the events leading up to the outbreak of World War II are fascinating. Fourth, you can really see the author developing as a writer over time. I am very interested to know if any French people have read and commented on this book because I would love to know how a local would perceive the events as written by a foreigner. I have the whole series so I am going to soon be reading the next one (Paris Journal, 1944-1955, which won the National Book Award).

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have so loved collections of Mollie Panter-Downes' "Letter from London" column in The New Yorker magazine, that I was inspired to read this collection. It is Janet Flanner's "Letter from Paris" columns from 1925-1939, showcasing pre-WWII literary and artistic (and occasionally political) Parisian life. I can't say that I like her style or sensibility as much as I like Panter-Downes', but it was an enjoyable read. She had a sharp wit and obviously traveled in interesting company. While I did skim some of the columns that referenced people and events I know nothing about, I read with relish her obituaries of some of the leading lights of the 19th century, such as Emile Zola, Brillat-Savarin (whose quotes I've seen often, but whose books I haven't read), Monet, Edith Wharton, and Anatole France. I also enjoyed her notes on Syvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, and other literary personalities of the day. I got a few to-read additions out of the book too.

[Kate Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Flanner was an American journalist who moved to Paris in 1922 with her lover, actress Solita Solano. In 1925 she began writing the Letter From Paris column for the New Yorker, under the pen name Genêt. This book is a selection from the first 15 years of those columns. It’s a combination of gossip, reviews, obituaries and day-to-day reporting. It’s an at times uneven mix and I don’t know if that’s an accurate reflection of the column or the way this book has been edited.

The book starts strongly, really making me feel the setting and wish I could have experienced it. Flanner clearly wasted no time in getting to the centre of social life in Paris, recounting a series of breathless parties and still-notable first performances. She was there for the première of the Stravinsky ballet Oedipus Rex, with lyrics by Cocteau and costumes by Picasso – can you imagine?

- See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2015/03/...

[haley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Janet Flanner was an ex-pat living in Paris for roughly 50 years, sending in to the New Yorker her weekly column "Letter from Paris." This book is the first volume in the series of these letters, and organized under subject headings. I'm intrigued by these letters because they mention and describe things the history books usually gloss over very quickly and monotonously. She sheds light on the characters of the time, from James Joyce to Colette to Radcliffe Hall. She has a very dry, sarcastic with that cracks me up, too. A characteristic excerpt under the subject heading, "Pablo Picasso" :

"Rumor says that what Picasso has been privately painting for the past three years is wonderfully ugly roosters, and that he painted the pretty flower pictures only to please Rosenberg, who is selling them at one hundred and fifty thousand francs each, probably only to please Picasso."--1939

[Monique · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Flanner was an American writer and journalist who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until she retired in 1975.

Excerpts from the twenties and thirties columns she penned for the New Yorker are included in this book. She speaks of a city that was at the time a center of artistic life, of cheap haute gastronomie and of fifth floor walkups for starving artists and writers, a Paris yet untouched by modern life.

We encounter the good and the greats from all walks of life, savour her recollections of recently departed luminaries and generally feel ourselves transported to that time when Paris seemed indeed to have been magical.

Another lovely read from beyond the grave.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend lent me this book and I am finding it a wonderful antidote to Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast."
Flanner wrote the Letter from Paris for the New Yorker from 1925 - 1939 and this is a compilation of (some of) those essays. Her writing is witty, graceful, just descriptive enough to make you feel you might be in Paris...but not cloying. She gives a fascinating view of some of the personages -- Josephine Baker, Ravel, Satie, Gertrude Stein, Charles Boyer -- with some of the best stories being obituaries or commemorations of the anniversaries of deaths. The moments just before WWII are particularly poignant -- first the response Chamberlain and then the gathering clouds of war.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superb as a snapshot of Paris between the wars, albeit a select portion of the city --- mainly the literary/artistic. Flanner wrote for the New Yorker as "Genet", and her sharp insights into French culture have achieved legendary status, as the insider who was also an outsider. I'd also suggest that you read it in tandem with Darlinghissima, the story of her long love affair, and possibly Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. In many ways she is similar to Cooke's "Letters from America".

[Elaine Young · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exceptional collection of essays on the great and the near great in France of the pre-second world war period 1925 -1939. Janet Flanner had a gimlet eye and a wit to match.I thoroughly enjoyed this book which I picked up on a second -hand table to read on holiday.I didn't expect anything from it except maybe a few hours amusement but I was enchanted by her prose and her charivari of famous personalities. I dip into it frequently to re-acquaint myself with Edith Wharton, Paul Poiret and various infamous murderers to name a few.

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed reading bits and pieces of this collection of articles submitted to The New Yorker by the author between 1926-1939. After reading The Paris Wife, A Movable Feast, and other writings featuring the salon of Gertrude Stein, I was moved to learn more about the expats living in Paris during this period as well as other movers and shakers.

[Dvora Treisman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've heard about Janet Flanner and her letters for years now, since I read a lot about France in the 20s and 30s. The book started out well, she writes excellently. But I was disappointed that, by the end, I found her bitchy.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 This was referenced in the bibliography of Paris Wife. Janet Flanner lived in Paris and sent back her impressions of the city and it's people to the NEW YORKER. This is a compilation of her columns. Very interesting time in that city, with many literary figures there.

[Shantel Miller]

This book is a fantastic window into Paris in the 1920's. If you have any interest in the rich cultural history of Paris in the 1920's. Flanner became friends with Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and many other expatriates of the time.

[Anya Nielsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paris was Yesterday 1925-1939
by Janet Flanner
foreword by James Campbell.
Published in 2003 by Virago Press, London UK. ISBN 9 781 844080 367

Following an ‘inappropriate marriage’ Janet Flanner retreated to Paris where her literary future began. She was employed by The New Yorker Magazine to write a gossipy column about the famous and infamous, aristocrats and criminals, and all who made the headlines in the 1920s in this racy and bohemian land. After her death, copyright of the original letters was held by her estate. These were subsequently edited by Irving Drutman with a foreword by James Campbell. The manuscript was first published in 1973 in the UK by Angus and Robertson limited. Virago Press published the current book in 2003.
Divided by year over the period 1925 to 1939 these short vignettes, obituaries and pointed statements were about inhabitants of Paris. People she associated with were a rich source of information allowing her to easily cast her net wide to capture juicy snippets and report on a veritable who’s who of society.
Essentially a collection of gossip she’d gleaned reflecting her take on current French political, social and cultural life. In the 1930s she lunched in the company of minor Surrealists. Surrealism was the ‘bastard’ descendant of Dada which aimed to shock people. They were anti-Catholicism, usually demonstrating their view by publically berating and spitting on priests and nuns. Other fundamentals of the movement were sadism and street brawling. They were devoted to the philosophies of Leon, Trotsky and Freud and committed to Communism as the only faith permitted by the movement.
Composers and the latest in music was a popular topic. “According to Ravel, a bolero is apparently a long black crepe cape, with a train the length of a hall carpet, worn exclusively when walking to funerals” (as cited, p98). She writes contemptuously about Stavinsky the Slav, which confused me thinking she was writing about Stravinsky who was a colourful composer who also lived in Paris at that time.
As an American ex-pat she says she felt very ‘at home while abroad’, living in St Germain des Pres, an American enclave, with all the amenities of French living but ‘cheaper and more agreeable than life in the US’.
Reporting on the death of Susanne Lenglen in 1938, she describes her as ‘respectfully admired’ and being a ‘hard-working, frugal living, obstinate, given to making occasional scenes, authoritative, capricious, expert at her job’. No punches pulled or sugar-coating, not even for an obituary. Although I enjoy the game of tennis and am glued to the television when the Australian Open is on, I hadn’t heard of Susanne Lenglen. She founded a tennis school, to develop coaches and to train talented kids under fifteen years of age, this school being the world renowned tennis centre at the Roland-Garros stadium.
The way Paris was Yesterday is set out seemed an ideal book to take while travelling, a book I could put down and pick up again at any time without losing momentum. Another important factor was that it is only 272 pages so not heavy to carry and of course Paris is a topic that I find interesting. However, I found it slow and somewhat disjointed. I’m afraid i have to say it’s probably best left on the shelf.

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been wanting to read Janet Flanner for some time now and saw this book listed in Antiquities bookshop's catalogue in Skibbereen, County Cork - a gorgeous hardback edition. When it arrived, there was a bonus as it was stamped with 'Library of Miriam Hapwood Dewitt' who was new to me. I looked her up and she was also a writer and, now, I've ordered her highly recommended memoir. In the meantime, I loved this. Flanner's intelligence and wit allows her to see through to the very bones of a situation. It's a wonderful mix of true stories - murder trials, restaurants and celebrities. If you have any interest in Paris in between the wars you will love this book!

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I liked this much better than the Paris Journal 1944-1965 as that covered more politics and war. This volume had Flanner’s interesting reporting on familiar faces of the Paris arts scene...and a couple of gruesome murders (Murder in Le Mans about the very sick Papin sisters).

[Seth Lynch · Rating 3 out of 5]

From the back of the book: In 1925 Janet Flanner began dispatching her famous New Yorker ‘Letters from Paris’, from which most of the pieces in this collection are drawn. I read this book as I wanted to get some idea of what American ex-pats of the time thought of Paris. The second Salazar book features Americans in particular. There were also a lot of them in Paris: there numbers started to dwindle after the stock market crash of 1929 but many remained until the War of 1939.


This book did give me what I wanted – although these would be ex-pats who don’t need to work. Or their husband’s work in well paid jobs and their wives don’t need to think too much about money. They don’t need to, but they think about it all the time.

At first I quite liked it. Flanner does have a good way with words. Then it started to grate. Perhaps because, as the years moved on from the 1920s to the 1930s there was no sense of the poverty or the sheer hard work of life. There is a piece on Chanel from 1932 admiring her brilliance in encouraging people to wear real diamonds. This brings a bit of glitz to these otherwise desperate times. And so we might imagine the washer woman in Saint-Denis scrubbing the factory floors dressed in a tiara and weighed down by sparking ear-rings.

Then there are the clowning obituaries of the Grand Old Dames of the last century who are choosing the mid-1930s to finally give up the ghost. Flanner will wax lyrically about their taste, charm, and style, and their elegance. These old ladies were so much more refined than today’s women who wear trousers and smoke cigarettes in public. The old ladies are not so very much behind the times though: The anti-Semitism of these anti-Dreyfusards is very much still in vogue and becoming much more popular just across the border.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of Flanner's "Letters from Paris" for The New Yorker, from 1925, the height of the Left Bank American literary community, to Sept. 3, 1939, the day of the France and England's Declaration of War, this is a great book IF you have some prior knowledge of figures in Paris at the time.

I went in as someone who is interested in the lesbian literary community of Paris/the Left Bank, so any mention of Sylvia Beach or Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes or Radcliffe Hall, or Natalie Barney delighted me. Especially Barney. Oh, the "history crush" I have on Natalie Barney!

Flanner gives a little background on each person and/or subject, she is writing for a wide American audience, after all, but her obits and updates and character sketches are mostly pithy and gossipy in nature. She covers everything from Dadists and the newest books (Oh, "Ulysses"!) to strange murders and heists, to grand visits (Marlene Dietrich! King George and Queen Elizabeth!) and remarkable deaths (Isadora Duncan and Mata Hari). Disappointingly and unsurprisingly, her writing on Josephine Baker is grossly racist, 1920's or no.

The rest of it, though? Worth reading if 1920's Paris appeals to you.

[Ria · Rating 4 out of 5]

If, as I do, you enjoy reading the Arts section of the New York Times or the Culture section of the London Telegraph, you will love this cultural and literary Who's Who of the early 20th century. Drawing on the fortnightly New Yorker "Letter from Paris" which she wrote under the nom de correspondance "Genet", Janet Flanner gives us Paris in the years 1925 to 1939 - Shakespeare and Company, Le Deux Magot, Hemingway, Picasso, Monet, Colette and the Pont Neuf looking "as we had known it on the canvases of Sisley and Pissaro". That's how it still looks to me. Paris is still yesterday and Flanner's closing entry is true again as we live through a new "War in Our Time". This is a book for the bookshelf, not the Kindle - and one to be returned to again and again. Thank you Lori for a wonderful gift.

[Pam Mezaraups · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the history, the characterizations (she knew everybody there was to know in Paris in those days) and the sly humor. She understood the French character and explained or exposed it to an American audience but always with a wink, an affection and an understanding. I am going to move on and read her journals from 1945 on...I love her take on the French and her take on the Gallic thought process and , of course, I want to see Charles DeGaulle in her eyes and the aftermath of a devastating war.

[Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides · Rating 2 out of 5]

More like 2.5, overall. It gave an interesting impression of France in this time period, but was probably not sufficient to do so if you haven't already read about the country's modern history. Had its 3 and 4 star moments, but not enough to raise its overall rating for me.

Parts are wince-inducing to a modern reader: there are moments of unthinkingly racist language in reference to black people (especially Josephine Baker). And it's hard to read the gushing over Chamberlain's peace in our time speech.

[K T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the selections in my 100 ONE NIGHT READS, i think I enjoyed this book the most, and I refer to it in my book talk with others. Janet Flanner was a correspondent for "The New Yorker". This a compilation of her columns from Paris during a pivital time in history. I did not recognize many of the people she referred to in her writings, but her insights and observations brought them to life for me. This is NOT a one night read, but it is an excellent compilation of articles on art, literature, society, politics, and people. I am so glad to have it on my bookshelf.

[Pam Small]

Although I wished I could be at her side, experiencing all she did while in 1920's Paris, I found this book to ramble alot. I kept reading more about her opinions of people, vs what her original column w/The New Yorker was mean't to do-tell us what Parisians thought about the goings on in Paris.
So, if you wish to discover this era, read A Moveable Feast by Hemmingway, or We were all so Young by Amanda Valli. Or less so, The Paris Wife.

[carl theaker · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Frommer's Guide suggested this book as reading for
a trip to Paris. I found the magazine articles in 'Yesterday'
an enchanting way to become acquainted with the city's
recent past (20-30s).

It really gives you a feel of the streets and times. One
thing they did then was have fabulous funerals. They were
always burying somebody famous.

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flanner, reporting from Paris for the New Yorker under the name Genet, was not a great writer but was a fabulous reporter. Then again, she had great material: Josephine Baker, the rise of Hitler, the death of Stravinsky.