April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989

 Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde writer, dramatist and poet, writing in English and French.  Samuel was born on April in Dublin, Ireland  Samuel died December 22, 1989 in Paris, France at the age of 83.

L IFE  Beckett came from a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, but much of his work was first written in French. After graduating with a degree in Romance languages from Trinity College, Dublin, Beckett spent two years in Paris as an exchange lecturer. Here he met James Joyce and became a member of his circle. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity as a lecturer. The academic life did not agree with him, however, and he left after only four terms to become a free-lance writer. He traveled in Europe and England, settling finally in Paris, his intermittent home since 1937.

Education  Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen. He was a natural athlete. Beckett excelled at cricket as a left- handed batsman and a right-arm medium-pace bowler. Later he went to play for Dublin University.

W RITINGS  Beckett's entire literary output, the narrative prose as well as the dramatic works, reduces basic existential problems to their most essential features. Beckett received the Nobel Prize for literature in The 16-volume Collected Works were published in Beckett's first play, Eleutheria was published for the first time in 1995, in an English translation, after a protracted dispute between Barney Rosset, Beckett's friend and American publisher and Beckett's family and his French publishers who did not want it printed because Beckett himself had judged the play a failure. Nevertheless, the play introduces ideas that Beckett successfully amplified in his later work, and anticipates the work of Eugene Ionesco and others in its use of the dramatic techniques associated with the theater of the absurd.

W AR  Beckett joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by Germany, working as a courier, and on several occasions over the next two years was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse department in the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region. Here 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 Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work.

L EGACY  Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with conventional plot and the unities of place and time in order to focus on essential components of the human condition. Writers like Václav Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter have publicly stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example, but he has had a much wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat generation to the happenings of the 1960s and beyond. In an Irish context, he has exerted great influence on poets such as John Banville, Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, as well as writers like Trevor Joyce and Catherine Walsh who proclaim their adherence to the modernist tradition as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream.

S AMUEL B ECKETT ' S P LAYS  All Strange Away  Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces  Collected Shorter Plays: Samuel Beckett  Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment  Endgame  Ends and Odds: Nine Dramatic Pieces  Happy Days, a Play  Krapp's Last Tape  Rockaby and Other Pieces  Waiting for Godot

D EATH  Samuel Beckett had moved to a small nursing home, after falling in his apartment. He lived in a barely furnished room, receiving visitors, and writing. He liked to watched tennis and soccer. His last book printed in his lifetime was “Stirring Still”. He died on December 22, 1989 because of respiratory problems

P ICTURES