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| Samuel Beckett |
Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for his writing, which, in new forms for the novel and drama, in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation. He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
More information: Samuel Beckett Resources
The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast.
Beckett travelled in Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot.
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| Samuel Beckett and his wife, Suzanne |
In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it, it was eventually published in 1992. Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.
After the Nazi German occupation of France in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance, in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over the next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. There he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Catalan Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life.
More information: Samuel Beckett and Philosophy
Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff". While in hiding in Roussillon, he continued work on the novel Watt, begun in 1941 and completed in 1945, but not published until 1953, though an extract had appeared in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy.
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| Samuel Beckett's Works |
In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. The
1960s was a period of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and
as a writer.
In 1961, he married Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in a secret civil ceremony in
England, its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law. In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem What is the Word, Comment dire. The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.
Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December. The two were interred together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be any colour, so long as it's grey.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter.
Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
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