Paris Was Yesterday: 1925-1939

In 1925 Janet Flanner began dispatching her famous New Yorker "Letter from Paris, " from which most of the pieces in this collection are drawn. Together, they give an incomparable view of French political, social, and cultural life in the years between the electrifying debut of Josephine Baker and the evacuation of Paris at the outbreak of war.

Flanner writes with equal eloquence of Isadora Duncan's art, Stavisky's swindling, and the Munich accord. She registers the impact of Americans on Paris -- Lindbergh, Mae West, Hemingway -- and marks the passing of the great and near-great, from Ravel and La Goulue to Clemenceau and Mme. Curie. Some of her most riveting reports deal with crimes of passion. And she tells little-known facts about the chief executioner of France and the heartbreaking exodus from Spain into France during the Spanish Civil War.

In a sequence of dazzling vignettes and essays, Paris is captured in its golden hour.