Born On This Day- December 19th... 20th Century's Own Jean Genet

"I'm homosexual... How & why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."

If you need an introduction to the life of Jean Genet try Edmund White's excellent & absorbing Jean Genet: A Biography, which gives readers access to this brilliant & brutal mind. Abandoned, arrested, & repeatedly jailed, Genet led a life that could be described as a tour of the underworld of the 20th century. Check out the Fassbinder 1982 film of his novel- Querelle starring Brad Davis.

Genet's work is recognized by its nearly obsessive & often savage treatment of certain recurring themes. Sex, desire, death, oppression, & domination. These ideas, central to Genet's artistic project, came directly from the artist's travels, imprisonments, sexual & emotional relationships, & political engagements & protests. Genet's works have been hugely influential for a vast array of writers, filmmakers, choreographers, & directors, Genet's life is not only at the source for his own work but also that of many important artists of the 20th century.

Jean Genet was born in Paris. Abandoned by his mother at seven months, he was raised in state institutions & charged with his first crime when he was ten. After spending many of his teenage years in a reformatory, Genet joined the  French Foreign Legion, but he later deserted, turning to a life of theft & prostituition that resulted in repeated jail terms &, eventually, a sentence of life imprisonment. In prison Genet began to write poems & prose that combined pornography & an open celebration of the life of a scoundrel, with an extraordinary baroque, high literary style. On the strength of this work, Genet found himself acclaimed by such literary luminaries as Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, & Simone de Beauvoir, whose advocacy secured  him a presidential pardon in 1948.

Between 1944 & 1948 Genet wrote 4 novels, Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, & Querelle, & the scandalizing memoir A Thief's Journal. Throughout the 1950s, he devoted himself to theater, writing the boldly experimental & increasingly political plays The Balcony, The Blacks, & The Screens. After a silence of some 20 years, Genet began his last book, Prisoner of Love, in 1983. It was completed just before he died in 1986, in Paris, & he is buried in the Spanish cemetery in Larache, Morocco.