Word: flanner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Sometimes, as in the case of Janet Flanner, this urge to self-censorship makes for a rather opaque style of revelation. Writing for a half-century under the pen-name of "Genet" for The New Yorker, Flanner generally focused her discriminating eye upon the social and artistic elite of Europe. Her work often recalls the advocacy for taste and manners so prominent in the pioneering efforts of Addison and Steele; at other times, Flanner inserts herself neatly into the turmoil of the age, observing a bankrupt Berlin of 1931 or reflecting upon the fate of Warsaw some time after...
...America's foremost contemporary reporter-turned-essayist, Joan Didion. When Didion undertakes a character profile -- her piece on James Pike, the Episcopalian Bishop of California, for example -- she doesn't begin with the subject, his family, philosophy, or even a recitation of his favorite food (as did Janet Flanner in a 1936 profile of Adolph Hitler). Rather, Didion begins the piece with a word about her own recollection of Pike's church, and then characteristically proceeds to lace the narrative with what she calls elsewhere, "always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable 'I.'" "The greatest study of Mann is Mann" wrote Janet...