Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in the late twenties, he went to Paris to join the staff of the École Normale Supérieure. He very soon made the acquaintance of James Joyce and his first published work was an essay on Joyce’s Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). This was soon followed by an award-winning long poem, Whoroscope, and a critical monograph titled Proust. He briefly held a lectureship in French at Trinity College, but resigned from the post when he realized he was unsuited to teaching. A novel written in the early thirties (Dream of Fair to Middling Women, published posthumously in 1992) was recast as a set of linked short stories and appeared as More Pricks than Kicks in 1934. Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates, a collection of poems, appeared in 1935, and was followed by the novel Murphy in 1938.

In 1937 Beckett settled in Paris after extensive travels in Germany and a lengthy period undergoing psychotherapy in London. He remained in France during the Second World War and was active in the French Resistance. The novel Watt was written at this time, but was not published until 1953. After the liberation of France he returned to Dublin to visit his mother whom he had not seen for some years, but soon returned to France as a storekeeper and interpreter with the Irish Red Cross, serving in their hospital in Saint-Lô.

From the spring of 1946 he elected to use French as his language of literary composition and, over the next five years, wrote two plays, four novels, poetry, criticism and four novellas in that language. With the production of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) in 1953, Beckett was finally recognized as a great artist. Successful productions of the play in Berlin, London, Dublin and New York consolidated his reputation. During his subsequent career as a playwright and novelist in both French and English he redefined the artistic possibilities of writing for the theatre and of prose fiction. Samuel Beckett won the Prix Formentor in 1961 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He died in Paris in December 1989 and is buried in Montparnasse.