Samuel Beckett

Who is Samuel Beckett?

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, near Dublin, in 1906 and educated at Trinity College Dublin. He settled in Paris, where he became a friend and occasional assistant to James Joyce, and he wrote in both French and English. Beckett is the central figure of the Theatre of the Absurd; his play Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot, 1953), in which two tramps wait endlessly for someone who never arrives, redefined modern drama. Further plays such as Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape and Happy Days, along with his prose trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, explore human existence stripped to its barest essentials. A member of the French Resistance during the Second World War, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

Sources: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953) · James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (1996) · Nobel Prize in Literature 1969 (Nobel Foundation)