Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland

Birth: 13 April 1906

Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland

Death: 22 December 1989

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin in 1906 of French Huguenot descent. He graduated from Trinity College in 1930 with a Bachelor's degree in French and Italian, briefly had a lectureship there, then traveled and studied in Germany, England and France before settling in Paris in 1937, where he was an intimate friend of James Joyce. During this time he published a long poem, Whorescope (1930), a short story, Proust, at about the same time, a book of short stories, More Pricks than Kicks (1934) and a novel, Murphy (1938).
"...you must go on, I can.t go on, you must go on, I.ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strang pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story , that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I , it will be the silence, where I am, I don.t know, I.ll never know, in the silence you don.t know, you must go on, I can.t go on, I.ll go on."

At the outbreak of the Second World War he was in Ireland visiting his mother, but he returned to Paris almost immediately. Though he at first considered himself neutral, the nazi occupation changed his opinions and he joined the French resistance and spent two years collating intelligence, then took refuge in Vichy France when his group was betrayed. Then he lived in disguise as an agricultural laborer and wrote Watt (not published until 1953). With the production of En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) Beckett received immediate critical acclaim, and this success was repeated in productions in London, Dublin and New York. A trilogy of novels followed . Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable . and a series of plays for theatre, radio and television, including All That Fall, Endgame, Krapp.s Last Tape, Happy Days, Play, Cascando, Film, Breath and Other Short Plays and Not I. His later prose work includes How It Is, Imagination Dead Imagine, First Love, Mercier and Camier, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho. Among his last works were in French, L.image, a 1,299 word single sentence, and stirrings Still, a monologue. Samuel Beckett won the Prix Formentor in 1961 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
Samuel Beckett died in 1989.
"Well, thought Belacqua, it.s a quick death, God help us all. It is not." -More Pricks than Kicks

You can view a timeline here Samuel Beckett TimeLine