Abandoned by his mother as an infant and raised by the state, Genet spent his youth in reform schools, the Foreign Legion, and prison before turning that experience into transgressive fiction. Works like Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief's Journal, championed by Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, made him one of postwar France's most provocative literary figures.
Genet's early life read like the plot of one of his own novels. Born to an unmarried mother who surrendered him to the National Foundling Society, he was raised by a foster family in rural France before being sent, as a teenager, to the Mettray Penal Colony for theft. He drifted through Europe as a vagabond, thief, and male prostitute, accumulating the prison sentences and underworld encounters that would later fuel his fiction.
He wrote his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, largely while incarcerated at Fresnes Prison, reportedly on paper meant for making bags, which guards confiscated and destroyed at least once, forcing him to start over from memory. When Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre discovered his writing, they championed him to Parisian intellectual circles and helped secure his pardon from a looming life sentence under France's habitual offender laws.
Sartre's 1952 study of him, Saint Genet, cemented his reputation as a literary outlaw-saint, a writer who transformed abjection, criminality, and homosexuality into unapologetic art at a time when French society offered little tolerance for any of the three.
Key people: Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau