This is the big one: not a companion, not a slim critical study, but a full-scale life of Jean Genet by a writer who actually had the range to meet him properly.

White approaches Genet as criminal, stylist, erotic myth, political symbol, and working writer all at once, without flattening him into saint or scandal. White's gorgeous prose, a gifted writer himself, affords this serious, expansive study of one of the most difficult and magnetic figures in twentieth-century French literature. It was widely received as a major work and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. 

Knopf paperback, first American edition, 1993. Visible creasing, cracking, and wear, especially on the front. However, inside in fine condition, no marks etc. A great and very 'keepable' reading copy.