American journalist Janet Flanner was BOTD in 1892. Born in Indiana, she studied at the University of Chicago, before returning to Indiana to write film reviews for the Indianapolis Star. In 1918, she entered into a marriage of convenience with artist William Rehm, escaping Indianapolis for the glamour of New York. She socialised with the Algonquin Round Table, meeting journalist Solita Solano, with whom she lived in an open relationship for 50 years. In 1925, New Yorker magazine editor Herbert Ross offered her the position of French correspondent. She moved to Paris with Solano, publishing her first Letter from Paris in 1925 under the pseudonym “Genêt” (presumably in tribute to French writer Jean Genet). She reported for the magazine for the next 50 years, including feature on murderous siblings Christine and Léa Papin, a government embezzlement scandal involving Alexandre Stavisky, Charles Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic airplane voyage and celebrity profiles of Isadora Duncan, Edith Wharton and the stars of the Ballets Russes. She became a prominent member of Paris’ expatriate American community, befriending Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, e e cummings, Hart Crane, Djuna Barnes and Ezra Pound. She also played a crucial role in promoting European artists and writers to American audiences, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Gide and Jean Cocteau. After writing an influential article series about the rise of Hitler, she returned to the United States as World War Two broke out. Returning to Paris in 1994, she made weekly radio broadcasts for American audiences. Her post-war reportage included coverage of the Nuremberg Trials, the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the French-Algerian War. After Solano’s death in 1975, Flanner returned to New York, dying in 1978 aged 86. Their relationship was described, unflatteringly, in Djuna Barnes’ lesbian potboiler Ladies Almanack. Her life and work inspired Wes Anderson’s 2021 film The French Dispatch, with Frances McDormand playing a crusading journalist based on Flanner.