Article: Jean Genet: The Miracle of the Prose

GENET

A Biography

By Edmund White

Knopf. 728 pp. $35

IN THIS extraordinary biography by Edmund White, the life and works of the French writer Jean Genet (1910-1986) are laid out with precision, tact and luminous intelligence. Although Anglo-American readers have become accustomed to the massively detailed literary biography - Richard Ellman on Joyce and Wilde, Gordon Haight on George Eliot, George Painter on Proust - White's is, I think, in a class all its own as befits its phenomenally eccentric and prodigiously gifted subject, a one-time thief, prison inmate, male prostitute, deserter and vagabond who is one of the very greatest writers of 20th-century France. Not just a fastidious ...

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