Our Lady of the Flowers.

GENET, Jean. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Jean-Paul Sartre [Peter Matthiessen].

$200.00

Item Number: 142737

New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1963.

First American edition of Genet’s debut novel. Octavo, original cloth. From the library of Peter Matthiessen with his bookplate to the pastedown. American writer Peter Matthiessen remains the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008). A prominent environmental activist, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008 at the age of 81 for Shadow Country. “No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea” (Michael Dirda). Near fine in a good dust jacket. Jacket design by Roy Kuhlman.

Genet's debut novel, Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs), was first published in 1943. A largely autobiographical account of a man's journey through the Parisian underworld, Genet wrote the novel in prison on sheets of brown paper which prison authorities provided to prisoners – with the intention that they would make bags of it. As recounted by Sartre in his foreword to Our Lady of the Flowers, a prison guard discovered that the prisoner Genet had been making this "unauthorized" use of the paper, confiscated the manuscript and burned it. Undaunted, Genet wrote it all over again. The second version survived and Genet took it with him when leaving the prison. "In Our Lady of the Flowers Genet has taken a tabooed subject and created a world that is our of this world. He is a magician, an enchanter, of the first order" (Richard Wright).