Samuel Beckett
1 book analyzed
Biography
Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) was born in Foxrock, Dublin, to a Protestant Anglo-Irish family — permanently between worlds. He studied and then lectured at Trinity College Dublin, became a close associate of James Joyce in Paris, and chose French as his primary literary language partly because writing in a foreign tongue forced him to strip his prose to essentials. During WWII, he was active in the French Resistance, hiding Jewish refugees, fleeing to Roussillon in the Unoccupied Zone when his network was betrayed. He wrote Waiting for Godot in French (En Attendant Godot) between October 1948 and January 1949 — a three-month burst following years of productive paralysis. He later said it was written 'as a relaxation' from the more demanding prose of the Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable). It was rejected repeatedly before Roger Blin directed the premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris, on January 5, 1953. Beckett received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, accepting it via telegram from a friend while hiding in Tunisia to avoid the ceremony.