Jean Genet
Writer
The playwright, poet and novelist, Jean Genet, was born on 19 December 1910, in France. Genet’s mother gave him up for adoption to a provincial family. By the age of fifteen, for repeated misdemeanors, Genet was incarcerated for three years, after which he joined the French Foreign Legion. He was dishonorably discharged, henceforth spending the next several years travelling around Europe. In 1937 he came to Paris, where again he was arrested and imprisoned for vagabondage. It was in prison that Genet wrote and after it was confiscated, re-wrote from memory his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1944).
After being released from prison, Genet was sought out by the avant-garde writer Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by Genet’s work, and petitioned the French president, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, to exonerate Genet after being faced with a life sentence. Genet became associated with the Theatre of Cruelty, and particularly his most famous plays, The Maids (1949), Deathwatch (1949), The Balcony (1956), and The Blacks (1958). Jean Genet died in 1986.