Janet Flanner, a struggling novelist with an unconventional lifestyle, was one of countless Americans living in 1920s Paris, now known as “The Lost Generation.”

Her friend Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, was starting an ambitious magazine with her husband called The New Yorker.

Grant loved Flanner’s letters about life in Paris so much, she hired her to write them as a magazine column.

Soon, Flanner was no longer “lost” but had found her life’s calling. Her groundbreaking “Letter from Paris” society column, under the nom de plume Genêt, would run for decades.

One French story came to symbolize the danger to Western Europe in the late 1930s: that of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann, who would become the last man publicly guillotined in France.

In the new book “The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII,” Mark Braude weaves together the tales of these two foreigners living in France and gives readers a remarkable look at the City of Light in the growing shadow of Nazi Germany.

The widespread view in America following the First World War was that the British had lied us into the conflict. Hoping to stay out of the next war, the public became insatiable for foreign news, and papers started large international divisions.

The top foreign correspondents became some of the biggest celebrities of their era, though as writers on current events, few remain well known.

Ironically, it was these same foreign correspondents who did the most to warn Americans of the threats of Hitler’s rise and advocate for American involvement in Europe.

Most were conventional journalists with strong political views, while others were idealistic adventurers like Flanner’s friend Ernest Hemingway, the one who remains the most famous.

Flanner was something of the odd woman out, an assiduously apolitical former minor film critic writing about French culture and society.

But as the 1930s wore on and the political consumed the personal, she increasingly felt it necessary to use culture to inform the public about the continent’s tensions.

I happen to have read Flanner’s main collection of prewar writings, “Paris Was Yesterday,” last year for no reason besides that I saw it at a thrift shop and like France and the 1930s. Much of the book is miscellanea only of interest to scholars of the era, but there are also timeless true-crime stories and dispatches from key moments in the lead-up to the Second World War.

She was a talented prose stylist........

© New York Post