Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett , 1906-89, Anglo-French playwright and novelist, b. Dublin. Beckett studied and taught in Paris before settling there permanently in 1937. He wrote primarily in French, frequently translating his works into English himself. His first published novel, Murphy (1938), typifies his later works by eliminating the traditional elements of plot, character, and setting. Instead, he presents the experience of waiting and struggling with a pervading sense of futility. The anguish of persisting in a meaningless world is intensified in Beckett's subsequent novels including Watt (1942-44); the trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953); How It Is (1961); and The Lost Ones (1972). In his theater of the absurd, Beckett combined poignant humor with an overwhelming sense of anguish and loss. Best known and most controversial of his dramas are Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957), which have been performed throughout the world. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Beckett's other works include a major study of Proust (1931); the plays Krapp's Last Tape (1959) and Happy Days (1961); a screenplay, Film (1969); short stories, Breath (1966) and Lessness (1970); collected shorter prose in Stories and Texts for Nothing (tr. 1967), No's Knife (1967), and The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989 (1996, ed. by S. E. Gontarski); volumes of collected writings, More Pricks than Kicks (1970) and First Love and Other Shorts (1974); and Poems (1963). His Collected Works (16 vol.) was published in 1970 and a comprehensive centenary edition (5 vol.) was published in 2006. Beckett's first works of fiction and drama were both published posthumously, the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) in 1992 and the play Eleuthéria (1947) in 1995.

Bibliography: See biographies by D. Bair (1980), J. Knowlson (1996), and A. Cronin (1997); J. and E. Knowlson, Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration (2006); memoir, How It Was (2006) by A. Atik; studies by H. Kenner (1968 and 1973), R. Cohn (1972 and 1973), S. Connor (1986), P. Gidal (1986), R. Pountney (1988), L. Gordon (1996), J. D. O'Hara (1998), and A Uhlmann and S. E. Gontarski, ed. (2006).

Beckett, Samuel (1906–89) Irish playwright and novelist. One of the most influential writers of the 20th-century, Beckett wrote in both French and English. He emigrated to Paris in the 1920s and became an assistant to James Joyce. His first published work was a volume of verse Whoroscope (1930). His first novel was Murphy (1938). Beckett's reputation is based largely on three full-length plays – Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957), and Happy Days (1961) – which explore notions of suffering, paralysis and endurance. His work is often linked to the Theatre of the Absurd with its repetitive, inventive language and obsession with futility and meaninglessness. His short plays include Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Not I (1973), and Footfalls (1975). Other novels include the French trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnameable (1953). He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in literature.

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Beckett, Samuel (1900–89). Irish novelist and playwright, whose Waiting for Godot (1952) was to the 1950s what The Waste Land was to the 1920s. A play in which ‘nothing happens, twice’, it was followed by others paring away character and action in a reductio ad absurdum raised to the level of metaphysical inquiry. Not I (1972) lasts only fifteen minutes and all we see is a shadowy auditor and a woman's mouth from which words stream, expressing, in Beckett's words, ‘that there is nothing to express … together with the obligation to express’. From 1937 settled in Paris and writing in French, his affinities were with Sartre and Heidegger, though an earlier Cartesian dualism often shaped his work. As a story-teller and novelist he was indebted to James Joyce, and his trilogy, completed in 1953 with The Unnameable, though not for the faint-hearted, is redeemed by touches of the master's sly humour.

John Saunders