In his early life he was a vagabond and petty criminal, but he later became a writer and playwright. Genet's mother was a prostitute who raised him for the first seven months of his life before placing him for adoption.
His foster family was headed by a carpenter and, according to Edmund White 's biography, was loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft.
For this and other misdemeanors, including repeated acts of vagrancy, he was sent at the age of 15 to Mettray Penal Colony where he was detained between 2 September and 1 March In Miracle of the Rose , he gives an account of this period of detention, which ended at the age of 18 when he joined the Foreign Legion. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency having been caught engaged in a homosexual act and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europeβexperiences he recounts in The Thief's Journal After returning to Paris in , Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage , lewd acts, and other offences.
In Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau , who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published, and in , when Genet was threatened with a life sentence after ten convictions, Cocteau and other prominent figures, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso , successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside.
Genet would never return to prison. By , Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems, many controversial for their explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality. Sartre wrote a long analysis of Genet's existential development from vagrant to writer , entitled Saint Genet , which was anonymously published as the first volume of Genet's complete works.
