Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock, Co. Dublin and educated at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied Italian and French. In 1928, he departed for Paris on a one-year scholarship to teach English at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His predecessor in this position, Irish poet Thomas MacGreevey, introduced him to James Joyce, whom he came to assist with his Work in Progress.

Shortly after his return to Dublin, Beckett resigned from his post as a lecturer in French in Trinity College. A period of travel began which took him first to London where he worked as an orderly in a mental asylum for a while. While there, his criticism of Proust was published and his fiction works, Dream fo Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy were written. Later, Beckett travelled Germany before winding up in Paris in 1937. After the occupation of France by the German army, he joined the Résistance together with his partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. When their network was betrayed, they fled to Vichy France and survived the last three years of the war in the village of Roussillon in Provence. During their time in hiding, Beckett completed his novel Watt. He subsequently decided to continue writing in French, a language, he claimed, that enabled him to write without style.

The work which finally brought him worldwide recognition and established him as one of the most eminent writers, En attendant Godot, was published by Les Editions de Minuit in 1952. A few works excepted, e.g. Krapp's Last Tape, All that Fall and Happy Days, Beckett continued to write in French and to translate his own works into English. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 'for his writing, which, in new forms for the novel and drama in the destitution of modern man, acquires its elevation'. Regarded by some critics as being both the last modernist and first postmodernist, Beckett has influenced, and continues to influence, writers, playwrights, musicians and visual artists alike. Samuel Beckett died in Paris on 22 December, 1989.