For 50 years, under the pen-name of Genet, Janet Flanner described the political, artistic and social life of Paris after World War I. She knew and saw people and events from Edith Wharton to Ernest Hemingway, from Charles Lindbergh's landing to Josephine Baker's debut. She wrote of the culture, the celebrities and the scandals of Paris and the wider Europe, and profiled de Gaulle, Picasso, Malraux, Mann and Hitler for her New Yorker readers. In Paris the American-born Flanner found the freedom to live and love as she chose, and her personal life was as passionate and complex as her public one. This book chronicles Flanner's lifelong relationship with Solita Solano and the turbulent love affairs of her later life. A chain-smoking, hard-driven perfectionist, Janet Flanner won the 1966 US National Book Award for "Paris Journal". In this literary biography, Brenda Wineapple brings to life the intense, compelling woman who, sporting a monocle, came to be synonymous with the bittersweet romance of the Parisian Left Bank.