Biography
Jean Genet was born in Paris on 19 December 1910 to a prostitute who gave him up for adoption within months; he grew up with a carpenter's family in Alligny-en-Morvan. Convicted of theft, he was sent to the Mettray reformatory in 1926, briefly served in the French Foreign Legion, and then spent years as a vagrant, thief and occasional male prostitute across Europe. He began writing in French prisons during the 1940s; Jean Cocteau championed his work, and in 1949 Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, among others, petitioned to spare him a life sentence. Sartre's 1952 essay Saint Genet affected him so deeply that he stopped writing for five years. From the late 1960s he became politically active, supporting the Black Panther Party and the Palestinian cause. Genet died in Paris on 15 April 1986.
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