JEAN GENET (1910-1986) was a controversial French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist.  Many of his works were considered scandalous for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality, but are today counted among the classics of modern literature, translated and performed throughout the world.

While still a teenager, Genet was detained at the Mettray Penal Colony for misdemeanors and repeated acts of vagrancy.  He joined the Foreign Legion in 1929 but was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency (having been caught engaged in a homosexual act).  He spent a period as a petty thief and prostitute across Europe, returning to Paris in 1937, where he was in and out of prison after a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts and other offenses.

Throughout his early novels, Genet works to subvert the traditional set of moral values of his assumed readership. He celebrates a beauty in evil, emphasizes his singularity, raises violent criminals to icons, and enjoys the specificity of gay gesture and coding and the depiction of scenes of betrayal.  OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS (1943) is a journey through the prison underworld, featuring a fictionalized alter-ego by the name of Divine, usually referred to in the feminine, at the center of a circle of tantes ("aunties" or "queens").  The auto-fictional novel THE THIEF'S JOURNAL (1949) describes Genet's time in the Penal Colony and his experiences as a vagabond and prostitute across Europe.  QUERELLE (1947) is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder; and FUNERAL RITES (1949) is a story of love and betrayal across political divides, written this time for the narrator's lover, killed by the Germans in WWII.

Genet's plays present highly stylized depictions of ritualistic struggles between outcasts of various kinds and their oppressors.  Social identities are parodied and shown to involve complex layering through manipulation of the dramatic fiction and its inherent potential for theatricality and role-play; maids imitate one another and their mistress in THE MAIDS (1947); or the clients of a brothel simulate roles of political power before, in a dramatic reversal, actually becoming those figures, all surrounded by mirrors that both reflect and conceal, in THE BALCONY (1957).  Most strikingly, Genet offers a critical dramatisation of what Aimé Césaire called negritude in THE BLACKS (1959), presenting a violent assertion of Black identity and anti-white virulence framed in terms of mask-wearing and roles adopted and discarded.  His most overtly political play is THE SCREENS (1964), an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.

THE DECLARED ENEMY (2004) brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985, bearing witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May '68, the treatment of immigrants in France, the Black Panthers and the Palestinians.


The following books are in PDF format unless otherwise noted:

* THE BALCONY (Grove, 1966).  Revised version, translated by Bernard Frechtman.

* THE BLACKS: A Clown Show (Grove, 1960).  Translated by Bernard Frechtman.

* THE DECLARED ENEMY: Texts and Interviews (Stanford UP, 2004).  Edited by Albert Dichy and translated by Jeff Fort.

* FUNERAL RITES (Grove, 1969).  Translated by Bernard Frechtman. -- PDF + ePUB

* THE MAIDS / DEATHWATCH: Two Plays (Grove, 1954).  Translated by Bernard Frechtman with an Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre.

* OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS (Bantam, 1964 / Grove, 1987).  Translated by Bernard Frechtman with an Introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre. -- PDF + ePUB

* QUERELLE (Grove, 1974).  Translated by Anselm Hollo.

* THE SCREENS: A Play in Seventeen Scenes (Grove, 1962).  Translated by Bernard Frechtman.

* THE THIEF'S JOURNAL (Grove, 1964).  Translated by Bernard Frechtman, with a Foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre.


See also SAINT GENET (1952), Jean-Paul Sartre's long analysis of Genet's existential development, available here: 
http://piratebayproxy.live/torrent/9495637/  

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