Jean Genet

Between 1944 and 1948, Jean Genet wrote four novels—Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, and Querelle—and the scandalizing memoir A Thief’s Journal. Throughout the 1950s he devoted himself to theater, writing the boldly experimental and increasingly political plays The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens. After a silence of some twenty years, Genet began his last book, Prisoner of Love (available as an NYRB Classic), in 1983. It was completed just before he died.