Beckett, Samuel

The acclaimed author of Waiting for Godot, Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906–1989) was born in Foxrock, Co. Dublin, on Friday, 13 April 1906. Close to his father and brother but periodically at odds with his pious Protestant mother, Beckett was at school in Dublin during the 1916 Rising, and in Eniskillen, in his second year at Portora Royal School, when Ireland was partitioned.

In 1923 Beckett went to Trinity College, where he completed an arts degree. In 1928 he became an exchange lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he met a number of artists and writers, including James Joyce. Upon his return to Ireland in 1930, he quarreled with his mother over his writing and his unwillingness to pursue a normal career, and in 1931 he abruptly left a teaching position at Trinity College.

He started his first novel in Paris in 1932. A short story collection, More Pricks than Kicks, was published in 1934. He completed his novel Murphy in 1935. Beckett was active in the French Resistance throughout World War II, fleeing Paris to Roussillon when his cell was betrayed (Knowlson 1997), and rejoining the Resistance in Roussillon. In the years following the war Beckett produced "a torrent of work" in French (Knowlson 1997, p. 355), writing (in French) and translating (into English) the novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.

Beckett became famous with the first performances of his plays Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1957) in 1953 and 1957, respectively. In 1959 he completed the comparatively lyrical Krapp's Last Tape. Thereafter, he honed his minimalism, producing short plays and prose works in which the boundaries between life and death, reality and the imagination, are annihilated. These include Eh Joe (1967), Not I (1972), That Time (1977), Footfalls (1977), Company (1979), Ill Said, Ill Seen (1981), and Rockaby (1982).

Beckett hated publicity—he went into hiding upon receiving the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. Although he refused interviews, he was nonetheless willing to make political statements. He withheld the performance rights to his plays in apartheid South Africa, but endorsed a 1976 production of Waiting For Godot by a black cast before nonsegregated audiences (Knowlson 1997, p. 637). He also opposed censorship in the Soviet bloc countries, and he dedicated his 1979 play Catastrophe to fellow playwright Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia's foremost dissident (and later president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic). Because Beckett insisted, at times irrationally, on his work's apolitical and asocial character, his recurring interest in Manichean social relations and power dynamics—as in the case of Molloy—in a clearly Irish context has yet to be elucidated fully.

Beckett, Samuel

Bibliography