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Other authors named Jean:
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Author's popularity: 2
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Popularity: 0
Vote: | A great wind swept over the ghetto, carrying away shame, invisibility and four centuries of humiliation. But when the wind dropped people saw it had been only a little breeze, friendly, almost gentle. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I recognize in thieves, traitors and murderers, in the ruthless and the cunning, a deep beauty-a sunken beauty. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man... not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Violence is a calm that disturbs you. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible. |
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Vote: | What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When the judge calls the criminal's name out he stands up, and they are immediately linked by a strange biology that makes them both opposite and complementary. The one cannot exist without the other. Which is the sun and which is the shadow? It's well known some criminals have been great men. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak? |
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Biography
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Jean Genet (1910-1986) was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal. He has written novels, plays, poems, and essays, including The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Maids.
Life Abandoned at birth, Genet grew up an orphan. Despite excellent results at school, his childhood was a series of attempts at running away and petty theft which eventually lead to his detention at the youth prison Mettray. In The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives fictionalised account of this period of detention which ended when, at 18, he joined the army in order to get away from Mettray. Genet deserted in 1936 and spend a period as a vagabond, petty thief and male prostitute across Europe, which he later recounted in The Thief's Journal (1949). Returning to Paris in 1937 Genet was in and out of prision through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage and army desertion. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem "Le condamné à mort" which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944). Jean Cocteau met Genet and was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published and when, in 1949, Genet was threatened with a life sentence, Cocteau, joined by such other key figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, got him acquitted. Genet never went back to prison.
Having written prolifically in prison, by 1949 Genet completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems. Genet's explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality was such that by 1951 his work was banned in the United States. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development (from vagrant to writer) entitled Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952), which, somewhat paradoxically, was published as the first volume of Genet's complete works. Genet was strongly affected by Sartre's analysis and did not write for the following five years. Between 1955 and 1961, however, Genet wrote three more plays as well as essays on Rembrandt. During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However, following a number of falls and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression and even attempted suicide.
From the late sixties, and starting with a homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit after the events of May 1968, Genet became more politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970 the Black Panthers invited him to the USA where he stayed for three months, giving lectures, attending the trial of their leader and publishing articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in Jordan and the USA, Genet wrote a final lengthy novel about his experiences, A Prisoner of Love, which would be published after his death. Genet also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, as well as Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert's Prison Information Group. He worked with Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a pervasive problem persistant since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. In September 1982 Genet was in Beyrouth when the massacres took places in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In respone Genet published his most important political text, "Quatre heures à Chatila" (Four Hours in Chatila), an eye-witness account of his visit to Shatila after the massacre.
Genet developed throat cancer and died on the April 15, 1986 in Paris. He was buried in the Spanish Cemetery of Tangier,Morocco.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jean Genet".
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