Genet (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Edmund White
- First Published: 1993
- Type of Work: Literary biography
- Time of Work: 1910-1986
- Setting: Primarily France; also Africa and the United States
- Principal Characters: Jean Genet, Camille Gabrielle Genet, Eugénie Regnier, Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Decarnin, Lucien Sénémaud, Decimo, Mohammed el Katrani, Tacky Maglia, Abdallah Bentaga, Bernard Frechtman, Marc and Olga Barbezat
- Genres: Nonfiction, Biography
- Subjects: Prisoners, France or French people, Gay men, Homosexuality or homosexuals, Sex or sexuality, Crime or criminals, Authors or writers, Abandoned children, Drama or dramatists, Acrobatics or acrobats
- Locales: Africa, France, United States
In 1952, the world-renowned Jean-Paul Sartre, at the height of his career, published a critical disquisition, more than six hundred pages long, on a comparatively unknown homosexual writer-thief, Jean Genet. This remarkable work, Saint Genet Comedien et Martyr (Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1963), accepted and celebrated many exaggerated, half-true claims that Genet had made about his past: that he had “chosen” to become a prostitute and a thief, that he had “chosen” to be homosexual, that he had been socially alienated by having been abandoned by his mother,...
[The entire page is 2522 words long]
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