Jean Genet
Overview
Jean Genet (19 December 1910 – ) was a prominent and controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but later took to writing. His major works include the novels Querelle of Brest
Querelle of Brest
Querelle of Brest is a novel by the French writer Jean Genet. It was written in 1947 and first published in 1953. It is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder, and its protagonist is Georges Querelle. The novel formed the basis for Rainer...

, The Thief's Journal
The Thief's Journal
The Thief's Journal is perhaps Jean Genet's most famous work. It is a part- fact, part-fiction autobiography that charts the author's progress through Europe in a curiously depoliticized 1930s, wearing nothing but rags and enduring hunger, contempt, fatigue and vice. Spain, Italy, Austria,...

, and Our Lady of the Flowers
Our Lady of the Flowers
Our Lady of the Flowers is the debut novel of French writer Jean Genet, first published in 1943. The free-flowing, poetic novel is a largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld...

, and the plays The Balcony
The Balcony
The Balcony is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Since Peter Zadek directed its first production at the Arts Theatre Club in London in 1957, the play has attracted many of the greatest directors of the 20th century, including Peter Brook, Erwin Piscator, Roger Blin, Giorgio Strehler, and...

, The Blacks
The Blacks (play)
The Blacks: A Clown Show is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Published in 1958, it was first performed in a production directed by Roger Blin at the Théatre de Lutèce in Paris, which opened on 28 October 1959....

, The Maids
The Maids
The Maids is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. It was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Athénée in Paris in a production that opened on 17 April 1947, which Louis Jouvet directed...

 and The Screens
The Screens
The Screens is a play by the French dramatist Jean Genet. Its first few productions all used abridged versions, beginning with its world premiere under Hans Lietzau's direction in Berlin in May 1961...

.
Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption
Adoption
Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents...

.
Quotations

'"This violence is a calm that disturbs you."'

'"But I would adore that thief who is my mother."'

'"If the hero join combat with night and conquer it, may shreds of it remain upon him!"'

'"I suffered at the time from an ugliness I no longer find on my childhood face."'

'"By remaining inaccessible, he became the epitome of those whom I have named and who stagger me. I was therefore chaste.

Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life."'

'"To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance."'

'"Yet, what is their violence compared to mine, which was to accept theirs, to make it mine, to wish it for myself, to intercept it, to utilize it, to force it upon myself, to know it, to premeditate it, to discern and assume its perils? But what was mine, willed and necessary for my defense, my toughness, my rigor, compared to the violence they underwent like a malediction, risen from an inner fire simultaneously with an outer light which sets them ablaze and illuminates us?"'

'"But--criminals are remote from you--as in love, they turn away and turn me away from the world and its laws. Thiers smells of sweat, sperm, and blood. In short, to my body and my thristy soul it offers devotion. It was because their world contains these erotic conditions that I was bent on evil."'

'"With homosexuality added, it would be sparkling, unassimilable."' [In reference to the French Gestapo]

 
x
OK