d. December 22, 1989, Paris, France
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born at Cooldrinach in Foxrock, County Dublin, on 13 April 1906. He was the second of two sons of a middle-class Protestant family. He studied at Earlsfort House in Dublin, and then at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen where he first began to learn French, one of the two languages in which he would write. Beckett's mother, May, was neurotic, bigoted, abusive, and cruel. Beckett, excelled in modern languages and athletics in the Protestant schools and at Trinity College in Dublin. Beckett enjoyed the vibrant theater scene of post-independence Dublin, preferring revivals of J.M. Synge plays. Moreover, he had the opportunity to watch American films and discover the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin that would crucially influence his interest in tramps.

Beckett traveled to Paris where he first met the fellow Dubliner who would become a important influence and close friend, James Joyce. Beckett assisted Joyce in the construction of "Finnegans Wake", but also began writing himself, inspired by the vibrant Parisian literary circle. In 1930, he published his first poem, "Whoroscope", winning a reward of ten pounds in a poetry competition. Shortly after, he published his brief but groundbreaking "Proust", a study of the recently deceased author whom Beckett admired so much. He returned to Dublin later that year to lecture at Trinity, and wrote a book of short stories called"More Pricks Than Kicks" (1934).

He wrote his first novel in Paris in 1932, "Dream of Fair to Middling Women" that was highly autobiographical, a powerful indication that Beckett was emerging from Joyce's shadow and developing his own voice. He went back to Dublin and then moved temporarily to London where he worked on much of his next novel, "Murphy". He moved continuously for the next few years before settling permanently in Paris in 1937.

When the German occupation began, Beckett joined the résistance. Beckett became active in the localized intelligence network known as "Gloria." and his group awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945. After the war, a breakthrough was reached. The "Siege in the Room," as Beckett characterized it, occurred in the years 1946-50, when his focus shifted to ideas of the essential, the minimal, the unadorned. French became his written language, and the problem of expressing -- expressing anything -- became central to his aesthetic. His trilogy of novels, "Molloy" (1951), "Malone Dies" (1951), and "The Unnamable" (1953), written at an altogether extraordinary pace in French and later translated into English by himself, is among the greatest prose writings of the century, and these books mark out in their pages a very grim but ridiculously circuitous and laboured path of human life.

When "Waiting for Godot" appeared on the stage in the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris in 1953, the world of theatre was startled to find itself changed. The plays which followed --"Endgame" (1958), "Happy Days" (1961), and "Play" (1963) -- similarly used abstraction as a means to explore the most powerful themes, and to question whether they have any value or meaning. Beckett returned to Dublin in 1959 to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity College, and two years later he won, with Jorge Luis Borges, the Prix International des Editeurs, and the Nobel Prize in 1969.

The 1970s were a less creative period, though he managed some new projects. In 1977 he began the autobiographical Company and in the early 1980s crafted more prose pieces as well as more plays. His last major work, the prose fiction "Stirrings Stil", was written in 1986.

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Quotes:

"Birth was the death of him."

"There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet."

"To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."

"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."

"Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must."

"What do I know of man's destiny. I could tell you more about radishes."

"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."

"God: The bastard! He doesn't exist!"

"How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones."

"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful."

"Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!"

On James Joyce: "His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself."

"To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something."

"We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals."

"Make sense who may. I switch off.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo."

"Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. . . . Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."

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