born Dec. 19, 1910, Paris, France
died April 15, 1986, Paris
French novelist and dramatist.
An illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Genet began to write while imprisoned for burglary. His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (1944), portrays an underworld of thugs, pimps, and hustlers. Miracle of the Rose (1945–46) is based on his adolescence at a notorious reform school, and The Thief's Journal (1949) recounts his life as a tramp, pickpocket, and prostitute. He became a leading figure in avant-garde theatre with such plays as The Maids (1947), The Balcony (1956), and The Blacks (1958), stylized Expressionist dramas designed to shock and implicate an audience by revealing its hypocrisy and complicity in an exploitative social order. Admired by the existentialists, he was the subject of Jean-Paul Sartre 's huge and adulatory biography Saint Genet (1952).