Samuel Beckett (1906 - 1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and theatre director who spent most of his working life in France and wrote in both English and French. [1] His plays and prose strip narrative to bare essentials to examine endurance, futility and the limits of language. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. [2]
Early life and education
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on 13 April 1906 in Dublin, into a middle-class Protestant family, and grew up in the suburb of Foxrock. [1] He was educated at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he read French and Italian and was elected a scholar. A gifted athlete, he played first-class cricket for the university, an unusual distinction for a future Nobel laureate.
After graduating he took up an exchange post as lecteur in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. There he entered the circle around James Joyce, for whom he did occasional secretarial work and whose influence marks his earliest writing. [3] He briefly returned to lecture at Trinity College before abandoning academic life for an unsettled decade of travel and short-lived jobs in Ireland, London, Germany and France.
Early writing and the war
Beckett's first published works included the critical essay Proust, the story collection More Pricks Than Kicks and the novel Murphy, which appeared in 1938 after many rejections. He settled permanently in Paris that year. When France fell in 1940 he joined the Resistance network Gloria SMH; after the cell was betrayed in 1942 he and his companion Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil fled to the village of Roussillon in the Vaucluse, where he worked as a farm labourer and wrote the novel Watt. [1] He was later decorated by the French state for his Resistance work.
Postwar breakthrough
In the years immediately after the war Beckett began composing in French, which he said allowed him to write "without style." The period produced the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, and the play En attendant Godot, staged in Paris in 1953 and in his own English version as Waiting for Godot two years later. [3] Two tramps waiting on a bare road for a figure who never arrives became one of the defining images of modern drama, and the play made Beckett internationally known.
He followed it with Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, each further reducing the resources of the stage. Later pieces such as Play, Not I and Rockaby pared drama down to a face, a mouth or a voice. Beckett also wrote for radio and television and scripted Film, made in 1964 with Buster Keaton, and he increasingly directed his own work in Berlin, London and Paris, treating staging as an extension of composition. [1]
Later life and legacy
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 "for his writing, which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." [2] Intensely private, he did not attend the ceremony and gave much of the prize money away. He continued to produce short, concentrated prose and drama into his eighties and died in Paris on 22 December 1989.
His influence extends across postwar drama, fiction and performance art, and his phrases have entered common usage. Along with Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet he is habitually grouped under the label "theatre of the absurd," a classification he himself regarded with scepticism. [3]
