Perhaps no other book provided a greater guide, as I set out on my youthful path, than Louisa May Alcott’s most beloved novel, Little Women. I was a wiry daydreamer, just ten years old. Life was already presenting challenges for an awkward tomboy…

  In the first stirring lines of The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet bares his youthful aspirations, his doctrine as a poet, and his tenets as a man. He offers a single sentence—“Convicts’ garb is striped pink and white”—then embarks on …