Our Lady of the Flowers

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Translated by Bernard Frechtman and with an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, Our Lady of the Flowers was written in a French prison on brown paper from which the convicts were supposed to make paper bags. Its eventual publication by Gallimard put Jean Genet immediately into the front rank of those French writers who expressed their genius through their understanding of the human condition at its lowest. himself is a 16-year-old murderer who has fulfilled his destiny by strangling an old man. In the world of Our Lady, of pimps, thieves, prostitutes, queens and blackmailers, morality in the common sense of the word has no meaning. Genet's fantasies from a prison cell, crystallizing round the handsome forms of his criminal heroes, shows his strength as a moralist in making these casebook outlaws into beings of significance to an outwardly ordered society.

Author Bio

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910. An illegitimate child who never knew his parents, he was abandoned to the Public Assistance Authorities. He was ten when he was sent to a reformatory for stealing; thereafter he spent time in the prisons of nearly every country he visited in thirty years of prowling through the European underworld. With ten convictions for theft in France to his credit he was, the eleventh time, condemned to life imprisonment. Eventually he was granted a pardon by President Auriol as a result of appeals from France's leading artists and writers led by Jean Cocteau.$$$His first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, was written while he was in prison, followed by Miracle of the Rose, the autobiographical The Thief's Journal, Querelle of Brest and Funeral Rites. He wrote six plays: The Balcony, The Blacks, The Screens, The Maids, Deathwatch and Splendid's (the manuscript of which was rediscovered only in 1993). Jean Genet died in 1986.