Samuel Beckett 1906 – 1989

Biography

Samuel Beckett was an Irish writer whose stark, bleakly comic plays and novels reshaped twentieth-century literature. Born in Foxrock, near Dublin, he studied French and Italian at Trinity College Dublin before settling in Paris, where he befriended James Joyce. During the Second World War he worked for the French Resistance and was forced into hiding in the south of France. After the war he began writing principally in French, producing the trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. His play Waiting for Godot, first performed in Paris in 1953, made him internationally famous: two tramps wait by a bare tree for a man who never arrives. Later works, including Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape, grew ever shorter and more concentrated. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. He died in Paris in 1989 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.