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Drama
Samuel Beckett
 Samuel Beckett (1906-89) was born
in Foxrock, a southern suburb of Dublin, Ireland, to an upper middle-class
Protestant family. He graduated from Trinity College in late 1927, majoring
in modern languages, and then taught for a brief time in Belfast before traveling
to Paris in later 1928. There, he quickly found companionship within an Irish
and international intellectual-literary circle and became friends with, among
others, James Joyce, who was in the midst of writing what would become Finnegans
Wake (1939). Joyce, suffering from severe difficulties with his eyes,
required help with his masterpiece and Beckett was eager to provide it. Some
ten years later, when the page proofs for the novel arrived, Beckett would
again come to the assistance of his friend and mentor. As a young writer,
Beckett published a lengthy poem Whoroscope in 1930, an essay on Joyce,
and his book-length study of the French writer Marcel Proust, Proust,
in 1932.
Beckett returned to Dublin and Trinity College in 1930 to teach and to complete a
master's degree, but the life of an academic was not for him. He left after
a few terms, finding teaching particularly uncomfortable, including the giggling
of his many women students who found him both brilliant and attractive. He
moved to London in 1933 and then traveled through Germany while Naziism was
on the rise, returning for brief stays in London and Dublin before returning
to Paris to join the Resistance in the fall of 1940. He received the crois
de guerre, one of France's highest military decorations, for the part
he played in battling the Nazis.
Throughout the 1930s, Beckett
published fiction with little popular success. His collection of short stories
More Pricks than Kicks was published in 1934 and his novel Murphy
in 1938; and he continued to publish fiction until his death on December 22,
1989. The most celebrated of these are his "trilogy"—Molloy, Malone Dies,
and The Unnamable, all begun between 1945 and 1950—and the three short
pieces published as Nohow On in 1990: Company, Ill Seen, Ill Said,
and Worstward Ho.
His career as a dramatist begins
in 1953 with his acclaimed work, Waiting for Godot. Endgame and
his radio play All That Fall followed in 1957, Krapp's Last Tape
in 1959, and Happy Days in 1962. Throughout the last twenty-five years
of his brilliant career, celebrated in 1969 with his receipt of the Nobel
Prize, Beckett published a number of short plays, directing many of them himself
in England, Germany, and the United States.
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Selected Bibliography of Beckett's Work
Selected Dramatic Works
Waiting for Godot (published, 1952; produced, 1953)
All That Fall (radio play, 1957)
Fin de Partie (Endgame), (1957, first produced 1958)
Krapp's Last Tape (1958)
Happy Days (1961)
Play (1963)
Come and Go (1967)
Not I (1972)
Footfalls (1976)
That Time (1976)
A Piece of Monologue (1979)
Ohio Impromptu (1981)
Rockaby (1981)
Catastrophe (1982)
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Further Reading About Beckett's Life
Bair, Deirde. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978.
Cronin, Anthony. Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. London: HarperCollins, 1996.
Gordon, Lois. The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.
Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.
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Further Reading About Beckett's Work
Adorno, Theodor W. "Trying to Understand Endgame." New German Critique 26 (Spring-Summer 1982): 119-50.
Birkett, Jennifer, and Kate Ince. Samuel Beckett. London: Longmans, 1999.
Brater, Enoch. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theatre. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Brater, Enoch, and Ruby Cohn, eds. Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990.
Burkman, Katherine H., ed. Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1987.
Cavell, Stanley. "Ending the Waiting Game: A Reading of Beckett's Endgame." Must We Mean What We Say? Theater. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Connor, Stephen. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday, 1962.
Harvey, Lawrence. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970.
Kott, Jan. "Endgame or King Lear." Shakespeare, Our Contemporary. New York: Norton, 1964.
McMillan, Dougald, and Martha Fehsenfeld. Beckett in the Theatre. London: John Calder, 1988.
Mercier, Vivien. Beckett/Beckett. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.
Pilling, John, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Watt, Stephen. Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage. Michigan: U of Michigan P, 1998.
Worth, Katharine. Samuel Beckett's Theatre: Life-Journeys. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.
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