Short answers, pulled from the story.
Jean Genet (1910-1986) was a French novelist, playwright, poet, essayist, and political activist. His major works include the novels The Thief's Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers and the plays The Balcony, The Maids, and The Screens. Before becoming a writer, he was a vagabond, petty criminal, and former Foreign Legion soldier who received a dishonorable discharge.
Genet was raised in Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France, by a foster family headed by a carpenter. His mother was a prostitute who placed him for adoption after seven months. Despite receiving excellent grades in school, his childhood involved repeated attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft.
Genet was sent to Mettray Penal Colony at age 15 for misdemeanors including repeated acts of vagrancy and petty theft. He was detained there from the 2nd of September 1926 until the 1st of March 1929, when he turned 18 and joined the Foreign Legion.
In 1949, after ten convictions, Genet faced a potential life sentence. Jean Cocteau, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pablo Picasso successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet never returned to prison after that intervention.
The 1961 New York production of The Blacks ran for 1,408 performances, making it the longest running Off-Broadway non-musical of that decade. The original cast included James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou, and Charles Gordone.
From the late 1960s onward, Genet supported the Black Panthers, Palestinian fighters, Angela Davis, George Jackson, and Michel Foucault's Prison Information Group. He spent three months in the United States in 1970 attending Huey Newton's trial and six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. In 1982, he was present in Beirut during the massacres at Sabra and Shatila and published a firsthand account titled "Quatre heures a Chatila."