Something about Jean Genet

This French writer, a dramatist and convicted felon, became one of the leading figures in the avant-garde theater. Genet' depicted the world of male prostitutes, convicts, pimps and social outcasts, the dark side of society which knew by his own experience. For a long time he was so addicted to theft that he stole diamonds from his hostesses at a literary reception. However, Genet's life changed radically when such prominent figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau clamored successfully for his parole. He subsequently escaped his criminal past and embarked on a new career as a writer, who glorified homosexual love and lawbreaking. "O let me be nothing but beauty alone! Quickly or slowly I will go, but I will dare what must be dared. I will destroy appearances, the casings will be burnt off and will fall from me, and I will appear there, some evening, on the palm of your hand, calm and pure like a statuette of glass." (from The Thief's Journal, 1954)

"In writing out for his pleasure the incommunicable dreams of his particularity, Genet has transformed them into exigencies of communication... Genet began to write in order to affirm his solitude, to be self-sufficient, and it was the writing itself that, by its problems, gradually led him to seek readers." (Jean-Paul Sartre in Saint Genet, 1963)

Jean Genet was born in Paris, the illegitimate..........(read more)


http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jgenet.htm