A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Samuel Barclay Beckett was born at Cooldrinach in Foxrock, County Dublin, on 13 April 1906. He was the second of two sons of a middle-class Protestant couple. He studied at Earlsfort House in Dublin, and then at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen where he first began to learn French, one of the two languages in which he would write. Beckett's mother, May, also a subject of dispute among biographers, was neurotic at least and at worst bigoted, abusive, and cruel. Merely to have been born may have been the Original Sin for Beckett - "astride of a grave and a difficult birth," as a character has it in Waiting for Godot. Beckett, who began studying French in kindergarten, excelled in modern languages and athletics in English-style Protestant "public" schools and eventually at Trinity College in Dublin. He autorbusght languages in Paris and at Trinity, but eventually quit, later complaining of moon-faced students and the absurdity of teaching what he claimed he did not know. At 17 he entered Trinity College, choosing French and Italian as his subjects. Beckett enjoyed the vibrant theater scene of post-independence Dublin, preferring revivals of J.M. Synge plays. Moreover, he had the opportunity to watch American films and discover the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin that would crucially influence his interest in the vaudevillian tramp. After graduation, Beckett traveled to Paris where he first met the fellow Dubliner who would become a seminal influence and close friend, James Joyce. In addition to acting as one of Joyce's favored assistants in the construction of the Work in Progress (later to be titled Finnegans Wake), Beckett began writing himself, inspired by the vibrant Parisian literary circle. In 1930, he published his first poem, Whoroscope, winning a reward of ten pounds in a poetry competition. Shortly after, he published his brief but groundbreaking Proust, a study of the recently deceased author whom Beckett admired so much. When he returned to Dublin later that year to lecture at Trinity, Beckett was writing his first stories- which would later comprise More Pricks Than Kicks (1934). Returning to Paris in 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women that was highly autobiographical, a powerful indication that Beckett was emerging from Joyce's shadow and developing his own voice. Out of money, he went back to Dublin and then moved temporarily to London where he worked on much of his next novel, Murphy. He moved constantly for the next few years before settling permanently in Paris in 1937. When the German occupation began, Beckett joined the resistance. Beckett became active in the localized intelligence network known as "Gloria." and his group awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945. Works produced by Beckett in these years -- books like More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), Murphy (1938), and Mercier and Camier (1946) -- while full of interest and appeal, are ostentatious in their literary devices and represent an author still unsure of himself, still too swayed by the encyclopaedic example and influence of Joyce. After the war, a breakthrough was reached. The "siege in the room," as Beckett characterized it, occurred in the years 1946-50, when his focus shifted to ideas of the essential, the minimal, the unadorned. French became his written language, and the problem of expressing -- expressing anything -- became central to his aesthetic. His trilogy of novels, Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), written at an altogether remarkable pace in French and later translated into English by Beckett himself, is among the greatest prose writings of the century, and these books mark out in their pages a very grim but ridiculously circuitous and laboured path of human life. When Waiting for Godot first appeared on the stage in the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in 1953, the world of theatre was startled (and perhaps a little resentful) to find itself changed. Didi and Gogo, music hall clowns complete with bowler hats, do very little in the course of two acts but wait, wait, wait, for someone named Godot, who may or may not be coming. The plays which followed -- Endgame (1958), Happy Days (1961), and Play (1963) -- similarly used abstraction as a means to explore the most powerful themes, and to question whether they have any value or meaning. Fame and accolades began to come in the 1960s. Beckett returned to Dublin in 1959 to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, and two years later he won, with Jorge Luis Borges, the Prix International des Editeurs (or Prix Formentor), valued at $10,000 and the Nobel Prize in 1969 (the third Irishman of the century to be so honored). Characteristically, he was unhappy with the increased public attention that accompanied the prize and in response to a demand for a new work chose instead to release the still unpublished Mercier and Camier. At this time, he also underwent successful operations on his eyes to correct the cataracts that had been plaguing him for years. The 1970s were a less prolific period, though he managed some new projects, including television plays for the BBC, and continued to interest himself in producions of his theatrical works. In 1977 he began the autobiographical Company and in the early 1980s crafted more prose pieces (including Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho) as well as more plays (including Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu). His last major work, the prose fiction Stirrings Still, was written in 1986. On December 22, 1989, Beckett died in Paris. Selected Works of Beckett:
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