Jean Genet (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
Jean Genet (zhuh-neh), celebrated by philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as a model of existentialist commitment, produced in his novels and plays an ethical stance of adhering to and flaunting the immorality of which French society and law found him guilty. For him, criminality was not a pursuit of gain or power but a matter of choice, a way of life. He imbued this way of life with his own aesthetic and religious principles. His years in the reformatory and his ten prison sentences attest a life lived largely in illegitimacy. As he lived, so had he been born—illegitimately in a maternity...
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