Beckett, Samuel (Barclay)

Beckett, Samuel (Barclay) (1906–89), was born at Foxrock, near Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He taught in Belfast before going to Paris as lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Superieure; there in 1928 he met Joyce, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. His first published work was an essay on Joyce (1929). His first story, ‘Assumption’, appeared in transition (1929) and in 1930 he returned as lecturer to Trinity College. He then embarked on five unsettled, solitary years in Germany, France, Ireland, and London, before settling permanently in France. More Pricks than Kicks (1934, stories) was followed by several full-length novels, including Murphy (1938), a grimly entertaining Irish evocation of London life, and Watt (1953), both written in English. His trilogy, Molloy (1951); Malone Meurt (1951; Beckett's own English version, Malone Dies, 1958); and L'Innommable (1953; The Unnamable, 1960) were all originally written in French, and all three are interior monologues or soliloquies, desolate, terminal, obsessional, irradiated with flashes of last-ditch black humour. Beckett's highly distinctive, despairing, yet curiously exhilarating voice reached a wide audience and public acclaim with the Paris performance in 1953 of En attendant Godot (pub. 1952; English version, Waiting for Godot, 1955). Beckett became widely known as a playwright associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, whose use of the stage and of dramatic narrative and symbolism revolutionized drama in England and deeply influenced later playwrights, including Pinter, Fugard, and Stoppard. Subsequent stage plays include Fin de partie (first performed in French at the Royal Court, 1957; English version, Endgame, pub. 1958), a one-act drama of frustration irascibility and senility, featuring blind Hamm and his attendant Clov, and Hamm's ‘accursed progenitors’, who spend the action in ashcans; Krapp's Last Tape (1958, pub. 1959), a monologue in which the shabby and aged Krapp attempts to recapture the intensity of earlier days by listening to recordings of his own younger self; Happy Days (1961, pub. 1961), which portrays Winnie buried to her waist in a mound, but still attached to the carefully itemized contents of her handbag; Breath (1969), a 30-second play consisting only of a pile of rubbish, a breath, and a cry; and Not I (1973, pub. 1973), a monologue delivered by an actor of indeterminate sex of whom only the ‘Mouth’ is illuminated. His Collected Poems in English and French was published in 1977. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969.