1 Lough Shore Rd, Portora, Enniskillen BT74 7EE, United Kingdom
From 1919, he attended the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
College/University
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
From 1923 to 1927, he attended the Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied English, French and Italian.
Career
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1961
Samuel Beckett, being at a rehearsal of "Waiting for Godot".
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1964
Samuel Beckett on the set of "Film" a movie starring Buster Keaton in New York City, New York.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1964
Samuel Beckett on the set of "Film" a movie starring Buster Keaton in New York City, New York.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1969
Samuel Beckett with Martin Held.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1970
Samuel Beckett, attending a first night performance.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1975
Samuel Beckett
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1975
Samuel Beckett
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
1997
Samuel Beckett with editor Jerome Lindon in France.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
Portrait of Samuel Beckett on the set of his movie, Film.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett looking at rushes from his movie, Film.
Gallery of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett on the set of his movie, Film, looking at a fish through a magnifying glass.
Achievements
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1968
Awards
Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1969 was awarded to Samuel Beckett "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
Croix de Guerre
Samuel Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre by General Charles de Gaulle in March 1945.
Médaille de la Résistance
Samuel Beckett received Médaille de la Résistance for his service in war-time France.
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1969 was awarded to Samuel Beckett "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
(Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, is set in...)
Murphy, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, is set in London and Dublin, during the first decades of the Irish Republic. The title character loves Celia in a "striking case of love requited" but must first establish himself in London before his intended bride will make the journey from Ireland to join him. Beckett comically describes the various schemes that Murphy employs to stretch his meager resources and the pastimes that he uses to fill the hours of his days. Eventually Murphy lands a job as a nurse at Magdalen Mental Mercyseat hospital, where he is drawn into the mad world of the patients which ends in a fateful game of chess.
(The complete, critically acclaimed Cambridge edition of T...)
The complete, critically acclaimed Cambridge edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett makes available for the first time a comprehensive range of letters by one of the twentieth century's greatest literary figures. The four volumes, spanning the period from 1929 to 1989, follow Beckett from his early writings, though the pivotal points in his personal life and career as he achieved ever-growing international fame, to his later work and life where he turned his mind to his legacy. Each volume provides detailed introductions, as well as translations of the letters, explanatory notes, year-by-year chronologies, profiles of correspondents and other contextual information.
(The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men wait...)
The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone - or something - named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning.
(In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty ...)
In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.
(Few works of contemporary literature are so universally a...)
Few works of contemporary literature are so universally acclaimed as central to our understanding of the human experience as Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy. Molloy, the first of these masterpieces, appeared in French in 1951. It was followed seven months later by Malone Dies and two years later by The Unnamable. All three have been rendered into English by the author.
I Can't Go On, I'll Go On: A Samuel Beckett Reader
(Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and acknowledged...)
Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and acknowledged as one of the greatest writers of our time, Samuel Beckett has had a profound impact upon the literary landscape of the twentieth century. In this one-volume collection of his fiction, drama, poetry, and critical writings, we get an unsurpassed look at his work.
The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989
(Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most pro...)
Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the "important writing," the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.
(Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of...)
Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the short play. This complete and definitive collection of twenty-five plays and "playlets" includes Beckett’s celebrated Krapp’s Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, Not I, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptation of Robert Pinget’s The Old Tune, and the more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams.
(This new, definitive volume presents Beckett’s poetry in ...)
This new, definitive volume presents Beckett’s poetry in the order it was composed, from pre-war to post-war, and contains previously unpublished and never-before-reprinted work. Along with his translations of Apollinaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and many others, this book brings together all of the pieces from Collected Poems in English and French, selections from Mexican Poetry: An Anthology (translated by Beckett), and poems that appeared in his novels and plays.
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, poet, and literary translator who lived in Paris for most of his adult life. He wrote in both English and French.
Background
Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1906, to middle-class parents, William and Mary Beckett. Mary Beckett was a devoted wife and mother, who spent good times with her two sons in both training and hobbies. His father shared his love of nature, fishing, and golf with his children. Both parents were strict and devoted Protestants.
Education
At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School in Dublin city centre near Harcourt Street.
From 1919, he attended the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh – it was the same school that Oscar Wilde attended. He was a good cricket player and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire there.
From 1923 to 1927, he attended the Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied English, French and Italian. His academic record was so distinguished that upon receiving his baccalaureate degree in 1927, he was awarded a 2-year post as an assistant in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Beckett returned to Dublin in 1930 to teach French at Trinity College and during the year he had obtained a master of arts degree.
In 1959 he received an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, Dublin.
During his time in France, Beckett joined the informal group surrounding the great Irish writer James Joyce and was invited to contribute the opening essay to the book Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of 12 articles written as a defense and explanation of Joyce's still-unfinished Finnegans Wake by a group of Joyce's disciples. Beckett also moved in French literary circles. During this first stay in Paris he won a prize for the best poem on the subject of time in a competition sponsored by the Hours Press. His poem Whoroscope (1930) was his first separately published work and marked the beginning of his lifelong interest in the subject of time.
Beckett returned to Dublin in 1930 to teach French at Trinity College but submitted his resignation, after only four terms, saying that he could not teach others what he did not know himself. A penetrating essay on Proust, published in 1931, indicates how many of his subsequent themes Beckett was already beginning to consider at this time. After several years of wandering through Europe writing short stories and poems and employed at odd jobs, he finally settled in Paris in 1937.
More Pricks than Kicks (1934), a volume of short stories derived, in part, from the then unpublished novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1993), recounts episodes from the life of Belacqua, a ne'er-do-well Irish reincarnation of Dante's Divine Comedy procrastinator of the same name who lived beneath a rock at the Gates of Purgatory.
Although Beckett's association with Joyce continued, their friendship, as well as Joyce's influence on Beckett, has often been exaggerated. Beckett's first novel, Murphy (1938), which Joyce completely misunderstood, is evidence of the distance between them.
When World War II broke out in 1939, Beckett was in Ireland. He returned immediately to Paris, where, as a citizen of a neutral country, he was permitted to stay even after German occupation. He served in the Resistance movement until 1942, when he was obliged to flee from the German Gestapo into unoccupied France, where he worked as a farmhand until the liberation of Paris in 1945. During these years he wrote another novel, Watt, published in 1953.
After the Liberation Beckett returned to his apartment in Paris and entered the most productive period of his career. By 1957 the works that finally established his reputation as one of the most important literary forces on the international scene were published, and, surprisingly, all were written in French. Presumably Beckett had sought the discipline of this foreign, acquired language to help him resist the temptation of using a style that was too personally evocative or too allusive. In trying to express the inexpressible, the pure anguish of existence, he felt he must abandon "literature" or "style" in the conventional sense and attempt to reproduce the voice of this anguish. These works were translated into English that does not betray the effect of the original French.
The trilogy of novels Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) deals with the subject of death; however, here it is not death which is the horror or the source of absurdity (as with the existentialists), but life. Another novel, How It Is, first published in French in 1961, emphasizes the solitude of the individual consciousness and at the same time the need for others; for only through the testimony of another can one be sure that one exists. The last of his French novels to be published was Mercier and Camier. This work demonstrates Beckett's interest in wordplay, especially in its use of French colloquialisms. Written in 1946, it was not published until 1974.
Beckett reached a much wider public through his plays than through his difficult, obscure novels. The most famous plays are Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). The same themes found in the novels appear in these plays in more condensed and accessible form. Later, Beckett experimented successfully with other media: the radio play, film, pantomime, and the television play.
Beckett maintained a prolific output throughout his life, publishing the poetry collection, Mirlitonades (1978), the extended prose piece, Worstward Ho (1983), and many novellas and short stories in his later years. Many of these pieces were concerned with the failure of language to express the inner being. His first novel, Dreams of Fair to Middling Women was finally published, posthumously, in 1993.
Although he lived in Paris, Beckett enjoyed frequent stays in their small country house nearby. He died peacefully in Paris on December 22, 1989, and was buried, as he had wished, in a small, quiet ceremony.
Beckett was a member of the Anglican Church of Ireland.
Politics
Samuel Beckett became a part of the French Resistance movement during World War II. Despite the generally negative attitude to Irish nationalism, the rejection of himself as an Irish writer and the fact that he spent most of his life in exile, the writer retained the citizenship of the Republic of Ireland for the rest of his life.
Views
Beckett's work is best seen as a refinement of the French existentialist thinkers who were his contemporaries. Existentialists primarily concern themselves with the problem of the meaning of life, specifically as it is viewed in terms of its inevitable ending. That is, existentialists are perplexed by the problem of enjoying life while knowing that death is just around the corner. Beckett's own take on this problem forces him down roads that other existentialists had not traveled - for example, into a discussion of the disconnect between the language one uses and the world one tries to describe with it and how this disconnect reflects the absurdity of life.
Beckett's work often tries to express the pure anguish of existence. In order to do this, he felt he must abandon "literature" or "style" in the conventional sense and attempt to reproduce the voice of this anguish. Indeed, these concepts - that existence is a kind of anguish - was widely expressed in French by authors Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. These philosophers were called "existentialists," and concerned themselves with the evaluation of the quality of human life, about whether life had meaning at all, and if so what that meaning was. Like Beckett, Camus felt that there was something essentially "absurd" about the lives humans live, in which they hope for so much but ultimately know that they must and will die, a reality that, in a way, diminishes the joy of life itself. Not surprisingly, then, Beckett utilized the French language to express his own feelings about the absurd.
The trilogy of French novels Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) deals with the subject of death. In a twist on the existentialists' thoughts of the time, in these novels it is not death that is the horror or the source of absurdity, but life itself. To all the characters, freedom can exist only outside time, and since death occurs only in time, the characters try to transcend or "kill" time, which imprisons them in its fatality. Recognizing the impossibility of the task, they are finally reduced to silence and waiting as the only way to endure the anguish of living. Another novel, How It Is (Comment c'est), first published in French in 1961, emphasizes the solitude of the individual consciousness and at the same time the need of every individual to have others he or she cares for; after all, it is only when one is with another human being that one can know one exists. The last of Beckett's French novels to be published was Mercier and Camier (Mercier et Camier) in 1970. This work demonstrates Beckett's interest in wordplay, especially in its use of French colloquialisms.
Watt, like each of his novels, carries Beckett's search for meaning a step further than the preceding one, or, as several critics have said, nearer the center of his thought. In many respects, Watt's world is everyone's world, and he resembles everyone. And yet his strange adventure in the house of the mysterious Mr. Knott - whose name may signify: not, knot, naught, or the German Not (need, anxiety), or all of them - is Beckett's attempt to clarify the relationship between language and meaning. Watt, like most people, feels comfort when he is able to call things by their names; a name gives a thing reality. Gradually, Watt discovers that the words men invent may have no relation to the real meaning of the thing, which would imply that the language one uses cannot help one in communicating truth. Language is separate from the world it tries to describe, an idea that feeds into the concept of the "absurd." After all, what kind of meaning can one's life have if one cannot even express one's experiences accurately?
When Beckett worked on his Samuel Johnson play, he tried to conform his talents to the traditional form of the play - including the use of five acts to tell his story. Waiting for Godot, however, broke the tradition. Additionally, in this relatively short play, Beckett throws action out the window. Unlike the plays of Shakespeare in which action is as crucial to the telling of the story as the words of the play, in Waiting for Godot, audiences are asked to watch two characters wait for a third person, Godot, whom they were each supposed to meet. Aside from the dialogue, very little happens. This minimalist approach to playwriting paved the way for so-called one-man acts, in which a single character does little more than talk to the audience.
In 1968 Beckett was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
1968
Personality
Beckett retained the shy and unassuming manner of his younger days throughout all his life. Unlike his tormented characters, he was distinguished by a great serenity of spirit.
Beckett had a strong interest in chess all his life. The passion for this game was probably passed on to Samuel from his uncle Howard, who managed to beat the current world chess champion Raul Capablanca during a simultaneous game with Dublin fans.
Beckett was attractive to women, for example, one of the richest women of her time, Peggy Guggenheim, the heiress of a multi-million dollar fortune, had a strong romantic interest in the writer.
Samuel's favorite book was Dante's Divine Comedy. The writer could reason about it or quote huge pieces from it for hours. On the writer's deathbed, in 1989, a poem, published in Beckett's student days, was found.
Physical Characteristics:
Beckett was tall and slender, with searching blue eyes.
Quotes from others about the person
Anthony Burgess: "Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing."
William Desmond: "In regard to absurdism, Samuel Beckett is sometimes considered to be the epitome of the postmodern artist … In fact, he is the aesthetic reductio ad absurdum of absurdism: no longer whistling in the dark, after waiting for Godot, he is trying to be radically silent, wordless in the dark. Beckett tries to bespeak a failure of the logos that never quite succeeds in being a failure, for to speak the failure would be a kind of success. Hence the essentially comic (hence unavoidably and ultimately affirmative) nature of his work."
Tom Stoppard: "The prospect of reading Beckett's letters quickens the blood like no other's, and one must hope to stay alive until the fourth volume is safely delivered."
Interests
Sport & Clubs
cricket
Connections
From the late 1950s Beckett became romantically involved with Barbara Bray, a widow with whom he also worked professionally. Their relationship lasted until his death.
In 1961, he married tennis player, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil in a secret civil ceremony that was held in England.
Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature both as a man and a writer.
1996
Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett
Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly recreates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989, revealing the real man behind the literary giant.
1996
James Joyce
Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.
1959
Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study
The book examines the themes, structure, and significance of selected works by the nobel prize-winning playwright.
The Theatre of the Absurd
In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents - Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others - shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.