Genet, Jean (1910-1986)

Jean Genet was a poet, novelist, autobiographer and playwright within the Theatre of the Absurd movement. He wrote licentiously on homosexuals and outlaws, and explosively about the dispossessed and powerless, in works such as Journal du Voleur (1949, The Thief’s Journal [1954]), Un Chant d’Amour (1950, Song of Love), Les Nègres, Clownerie (1957, The Blacks: A Clown Show [1960]), and Les Paravents (1961, The Screens [1962]). His contemporaries recognized him as a unique innovator: Jean-Paul Sartre celebrated Genet’s life in a biography, Jacques Derrida discussed Genet’s construal of the autobiographical mode in Glas, and Jean Cocteau described him as the ‘greatest writer of the modern era.’