Flanner

Flanner put it into words first.

The sunshine-noir dialectic, the intimations of doom in the hard light glinting across acres of traffic — the most powerful tropes of Los Angeles, before they became tropes, were all in Flanner’s five-stanza distillation, as deceptively simple as Wallace Stevens.

The book, said New Yorker writer Janet Flanner, was “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet.”

The late writer Janet Flanner called it “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet.”

It was home to two of the city’s most famous literary cafes: Les Deux Magots, where a picture of Ernest Hemingway and The New Yorker Paris correspondent Janet Flanner hung behind my favorite table against the back wall, and Café de Flore, which had often doubled as Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s living room.