Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, into a comfortable Protestant family. He studied French and Italian at Trinity College Dublin and in 1928 went to Paris as a lecturer at the École normale supérieure, where he became a close friend and assistant of James Joyce. His early work — an essay on Proust, the stories of More Pricks Than Kicks and the novel Murphy — showed a formidable, erudite comic gift still under Joyce’s shadow. He settled permanently in Paris in the late 1930s.

During the Second World War Beckett joined a Resistance network; when it was betrayed in 1942 he fled with his partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, to the village of Roussillon, and he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. After the war he began writing in French, and in a few intense years produced the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, together with Waiting for Godot. The play’s premiere in Paris in 1953 made him famous: two tramps wait for someone who never comes, and fill the time with talk, routines and tenderness. Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape and Happy Days followed, many written or translated by Beckett himself between French and English. His later prose and drama grew ever briefer and more exact, reducing language to a voice, a light, a mouth.

When the Nobel Prize was announced in 1969 Beckett, who shunned publicity, did not attend the ceremony; his French publisher, Jérôme Lindon, accepted on his behalf. He continued to direct his own plays and to write until the end of his life. He died in Paris in December 1989, a few months after Suzanne.