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This is the third of Genet's prose works to be published in the United States, following Our Lady of the Flowers (1963) and The Thief's Journal (1964). It is, however, Genet's second novel, having been written in La Santé and Tourelles prisons in 1943, directly after Our Lady of the Flowers. Like that first work, Miracle of the Rose was written in the solitude of a prison cell, on the pieces of white paper the penal authorities furnish the convicts for making paper bags. The work is set in the State prison of Fontevrault. It is the height of the German Occupation and in the prisons of France the convicts, barely subsisting on near-starvation rations, spend their endless days weaving camouflage nets for their German conquerors. Miracle of the Rose is, first of all, an account of life at Fontevrault during that period. But Genet is no realist, and his account of prison life is an extraordinary mixture of dreams and reality, past and present.