Jean Genet

Genet was abandoned by his mother as an infant, raised by the state welfare agency and a foster family in rural France, and began a life of petty theft, vagrancy, and male prostitution across Europe as a teenager, drifting in and out of reformatories and prisons for two decades. He wrote Our Lady of the Flowers in Fresnes prison in the early 1940s, reportedly on paper intended for the workshop's paper bags.

Facing a possible life sentence under France's habitual-offender laws, he was saved by a campaign led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who championed his manuscripts and secured a presidential pardon; Sartre's book-length study Saint Genet made him a literary cause célèbre. He largely abandoned fiction after the 1940s for theater and, later, political activism (supporting the Black Panthers and the Palestinian cause) until his death in 1986.