Our Lady of the Flowers

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. Our Lady of the Flowers 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.