December 19, 1910

Jean Genet (December 19, 1910 to April 15, 1986) never had a chance. He was abandoned as an infant, imprisoned as a boy for theft. According to his Encyclopedia Britannica article:

He began to write in 1942 while imprisoned for theft at Fresnes and produced an outstanding novel, Notre-Dame des Fleurs (1943; Our Lady of the Flowers), vividly portraying the prewar Montmartre underworld of thugs, pimps, and perverts. His talent was brought to the attention of Jean Cocteau and later Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Because Genet in 1948 was convicted of theft for the 10th time and would have faced automatic life imprisonment if convicted again, a delegation of well-known writers appealed on his behalf to the president of the French republic, and he was “pardoned in advance.”
...[Genet's] autobiographical Journal du voleur (1949; The Thief’s Journal) gives a complete and uninhibited account of his life as a tramp, pickpocket, and male prostitute.


There is an imaginative account of a cat killing, during World War II when there was not enough food, in Genet's book Funeral Rites (1947). Sartre said Genet did not have an "ethics of evil," but a "black aesthetics."

However, we can generally discount Sartre's views. In reference to Genet, this stellar artist of the 20th century actually, was doing what every writing school class starts with: write what you know; he just happened to be a world-class genius. Genet made his own chances in a manner rare in any settings. His descriptions of realities beyond the bourgeois, is actually part of a European ability to regard physical realities with a detachment the British find unsettling.

I find this description of Genet's final milieu, in his New York Times obit, of interest:

A short, bald man with a compact, muscular body, Genet was an exceedingly private person, despite his notorious personal life. The Paris hotel room in which he died had been his home for several years, but even his publisher did not know how to reach him. Reportedly the room was pristine and cell-like, and all of his possessions fit into one small suitcase. His mail was delivered to his publisher's office; even the address on his passport was Gallimard's.