Samuel Beckett
was born on April 13, 1906 in Dublin, Ireland where he spent his childhood years, then enrolled in Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927, where he studied English, French and Italian. In 1928, he moved to Paris to become lecteur d’anglais at the Ecole Normale Supérieure till 1930. It was there that he met and worked for James Joyce conducting research for what would become Finnegan’s Wake. In 1933, he published his short story collection, More Pricks Than Kicks and also released a volume of his poetry, but it wasn’t until 1938, that the publication of his novel Murphy brought significant attention to his writing. For his wartime efforts against the occupying Nazi forces, Beckett received the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.
In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin whereupon he came to the realization that he would never come out from the under the shadow of his mentor and countryman, James Joyce, unless he went in the opposite direction of Joyce’s literature of abundance. He determined that he would direct his attention to the writing of impoverishment, ignorance and economy. As a result, his works became exercises in starkness and circular language, with spare but resonant scenarios. His trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable were published in French from 1951 to 1953, with their English translations following shortly thereafter. These became acknowledged masterpieces of alienation and existentialism, using book-length stream-of-consciousness monologues that laid bare Beckett’s philosophy of dualism and despair. Often, his characters undergo a dislocation of identity, marked by a separation between body and mind, which renders their lives absurd. En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) was the play that established him as a modern genius when it was first performed in 1953, as nothing quite like it had ever been presented. Other significant works for the theatre soon followed: Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961), but he also wrote numerous short works that have added much to the canon of his theatrical work: Act Without Words I and II, Not I, Come and Go, Footfalls, Rockaby, and Ohio Impromptu, among so many others. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. As one of the most prominent absurdists of the age, along with Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugene Ionesco, and Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett has made lasting contributions to World Theatre and continues to influence many writers and theatre-makers today.
Links:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samuel-beckett
