Beckett, Samuel Barclay (1906-1989)

Irish dramatist, novelist, and poet, who wrote in both French and English. He won international acclaim for his work, which includes the play En attendant Godot - first performed in Paris in 1952, and then in his own translation as Waiting for Godot in London in 1955 and New York in 1956 - and for his later dramas, such as Fin de partie/Endgame (1957-58) and Happy Days (1961). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Grappling with fundamental problems of identity, choice, purpose, knowledge, and narration, his characters demonstrate a distinctive compound of despair, endurance, and wit.

Beckett was born in Foxrock, near Dublin, and was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He lectured in English in Paris, France, where he was a member of the same circle of artists as Irish writer James Joyce. Beckett lectured in French at Trinity College 1930-31, but abandoned his academic career. After several years of European travel, in 1937 he settled in Paris, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre for his service in the French Resistance.

As well as reducing character to the grimmest essentials, Beckett honed his prose with meticulous precision to an articulate, exact style. Composition in French, before translating into English, helped towards this distillation of language. Beckett's earliest work included criticism on Joyce and French writer Marcel Proust, witty and allusive poetry - notably Whoroscope (1931) - and an unfinished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (posthumously published in 1992). His published fiction began with the short stories of More Pricks than Kicks (1934), which, with grim humour, plot the slow wandering of their hero Belacqua among the Dublin streets; his work at this period was heavily indebted to Joyce. With Murphy (1938), Molloy (1951), Malone meurt/Malone Dies (1951/1958), Watt (1953), L'Innommable/The Unnamable (1953/1960), and Comment c'est/How It Is (1961/1964), the main character's mobility decreases, being reduced in How It Is to a cyclic crawl in the mud. Beckett's increasingly spare and modulating prose becomes extraordinarily concentrated in his later short fiction, which includes Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982), and his last prose work, Stirrings Still (1988).

The preoccupations of Beckett's fiction are repeated in his drama. His characters are trapped in various states of incapacity and near-immobility: two tramps waiting in vain for a mysterious figure; an old couple confined to dustbins; a woman buried to the waist in sand. In his later short ‘dramaticules’ he developed an even more minimalist conception of theatre: the illuminated mouth declaiming in Not I (1973), for example, or the solitary sigh over a rubbish-strewn stage of Breath (1969). Beckett also experimented with scripts for radio, television, and a short film.

Early critics associated Beckett's drama with the Theatre of the Absurd, and his fiction with the French vogue for the anti-romain, but his work was shaped by a far wider set of influences drawn from his extensive reading in European literature and philosophy.