LETTER: Editorial Correspondence with William Shawn.
Janet Flanner - William Shawn Correspondence
1941-1978
Flanner, Janet. Correspondence with William Shawn, 1941-1978.
A collection of 111 letters from Janet Flanner to William Shawn, broken down as follows: 4 autograph letters, 4 autograph notes, 11 autograph postcards, 18 typed letters, 45 cablegrams and 29 Xeroxes of typed and autograph letters; together with 50 of Shawn’s telegram replies. The 7 earliest letters in the collection (1941-1949) are from Flanner to Harold Ross (Shawn’s predecessor) and are broken down as follows: 3 typed letters, 3 copies and 1 cablegram; and 15 carbon copies of letters from Ross to Flanner; the letters to Shawn commence in 1946 and continue to Flanner’s death, in 1978.
The bulk of these communications were sent soon after Flanner’s return to Europe after World War II; these letters transmit a sense of urgency and uncertainty about her situation. On December 7, 1944, Ross urges – apparently in response to Flanner’s anxiety about spending the winter in war-torn Paris – “You’ve got to be a pioneer woman for a while and the thing to do is make yourself as comfortable as possible.” It is clear that, like Shawn, Ross had great respect for Flanner and her position as a war correspondent; in a later letter, he writes, “It may be unfair to the management of this company, in view of the rather heavy costs of maintaining a correspondent in Europe and the great value of an accreditation there, but my allegiance to you is more than to the management a dozen times over, and my obligation too” (May 14, 1945).
Flanner’s correspondence is also a record of her travels around the globe. Many of her letters – both typed and autograph – are written on New Yorker letterhead; Hotel Continental/Paris letterhead (her home for many years); Hotel George V, Paris; Hotel Terme in Abano, Italy (where she visited frequently to have mud bath treatments); postcards sent from Rome, Hawaii, California, London and Mexico; telegrams from the Press Wireless service; and scraps of plain writing or typing paper. No matter where she wrote her letters, she imbues all with her unmistakable writing style – greeting Shawn as “my dear,” or “darling,” followed by wordy, unbroken paragraphs, often several pages long (the typed letters frequently bearing her autograph emendations), and closing, simply, with “love.” In her autograph letters, her distinctive handwriting – an exaggerated mixture of loopy and pointy characters – is at times illegible, suggesting these communications were dashed off in a hurry.
Also included are 7 letters to Shawn from Mike Bessie at Atheneum (who published Flanner’s Paris Journal); 1 letter from the Overseas Press Club alerting Shawn to an award Flanner had won; 4 autograph letters from Flanner’s intimate friend Solita Solano; 2 typed letters from Irving Drutman, who edited Janet Flanner’s World; 1 letter from the Alumni Association of the University of Chicago informing Shawn about another award for Flanner; 1 letter to Shawn from Flanner’s cousin, Judge Buchanan; 1 leaf of a typed Paris Letter, with Flanner’s autograph notations, undated; 8 leaves of a typed, Xeroxed draft of a “Preface” Flanner wrote for a friend’s book in 1974 that was never used (Flanner’s great love, Natalia Danesi Murray, sent it to Shawn in 1978); 1 letter from Murray to Shawn, together with a 6-page typed copy of the Table of Contents for Janet Flanner’s World, requesting a “Preface” from Shawn; 2 Xerox copies of Shawn’s “Preface,” (1 with autograph emendations); 6-page print-out listing the dates that all of Flanner’s Paris Letters and Profiles ran; and several Xerox draft copies of Flanner’s obituary that ran in the New Yorker.
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Flanner was the Paris Correspondent for the New Yorker for the bulk of the twentieth century. Writing under the pen name “Genêt,” she contributed “more than six hundred” bi-monthly “Letters from Paris” from October 10, 1925 to December 15, 1975 (see letter from Shawn on Dec
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