She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on March 13, 1892. She matriculated at the University of Chicago in 1912, but left the University after two rocky years, worked for a time in a girls' reformatory, then in 1916 became a drama and art critic for the Indianapolis Star.

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Toward the end of World War I, Flanner, married to a man she did not love, moved to New York City where she became acquainted with Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant. They introduced her to the most profound and enduring love of her life, Solita Solano, drama editor for the New York Tribune.

In New York, Flanner explored her sexuality, participated in the suffrage movement and early feminist organizations, and moved in the circle of the Algonquin Round Table. As she began to find her own place among the strong and stimulating professional women of Greenwich Village and as her relationship with Solano intensified, the illusion of her marriage became increasingly difficult to maintain.

When Solano was sent on assignment to Greece in 1921, Flanner went with her. By the time the two women settled in Paris in 1922, Flanner was divorced. Flanner lived almost all the rest of her life in France, returning to the United States only for the duration of World War II and again near the end of her life. She died on November 7, 1978, in New York City.

In Paris, Flanner knew virtually all the major figures of the literary expatriate community on the Left Bank. She regularly wrote to Jane Grant of Parisian personalities and cultural happenings. When Ross started the New Yorker in 1925, Grant encouraged him to include Flanner's letters as a regular feature.

On October 10, 1925, Ross published the first "Letter from Paris," signing it "Genêt" without Flanner's knowledge. Her "Letters" had no journalistic model or precedent, but soon Flanner was developing and refining a new genre of analytic commentary that, as she described it in Paris Was Yesterday (1972), "instinctively leaned toward comments with a critical edge, indeed a double edge, if possible."

Her instructions from Ross were to present to an American audience life as the French perceived it. He wanted the writing to be "precisely accurate, highly personal, colorful, and ocularly descriptive," the style that came to define the New Yorker itself.

Although none of Flanner's journalism or fiction develops in any real depth overt lesbian content or themes, she was a prominent figure in the lesbian community of expatriate Paris. She was a regular guest at Natalie Clifford Barney's famous lesbian salon, and she and Solano appear in Djuna Barnes's satire of that community, Ladies Almanack (1928), as "Nip and Tuck," a pair of plucky journalists.

Although she wrote one novel, The Cubical City (1926), translated two novels for her friend Colette, and published in dozens of journals, magazines, and newspapers, Flanner's position as a journalist set her apart from the other literary Americans in Paris.

She considered herself only a "minor Left Banker" and admits that F. Scott Fitzgerald was "the only one of [her] writer friends who ever gave [her] the mutual identification of . . . having any literary sensibilities." She nonetheless won a National Book Award for Paris Journal: 1944-1965 in 1966 and received an honorary Ph.D. from Smith College in 1958.

American lesbian literature prior to Stonewall exploited the "outlaw" status of the lesbian as it moved from encrypted strategies of expression to overt political celebrations of woman-for-woman passion.

The contributions of gay men and lesbians to twentieth-century French literature have been closely intertwined with the course of mainstream literature.

American novelist Djuna Barnes sought new forms of self-representation of lesbians in the face of society's compulsory heterosexuality.

In addition to being the muse and inspiration of other writers, American expatriate Natalie Barney, known as the Amazon, was a poet, memoirist, and epigrammatist in her own right.

One of France's most beloved authors, Colette wrote novels with strong lesbian subtexts.

Publisher, book designer, and museum director, Monroe Wheeler was a leading figure in New York artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s, alongside his partner of sixty-eight years, the writer Glenway Wescott.