After Jean Genet's death in a modest Parisian hotel room, after a long bout with throat cancer, Jack Lang, the former minister of culture, said: "Jean Genet has left us, and with him, a black sun that enlightened the seamy side of things. Jean Genet was liberty itself, and those who hated and fought him were hypocrites." Earlier, when Genet was in prison, Lang's notion about the writer's being "liberty itself" probably would have astonished and enraged the convict; in his mature years, when his plays were being performed throughout the world by distinguished theatrical companies, he would have been angered by the observation that he had written to "enlighten the seamy side of things." At the beginning of his writing career, his purpose was somewhat different and vastly more audacious, for Genet's aim in his first prose works was to show that what to some was seamy...