Samuel Beckett

One of the major writers of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett created an extraordinarily original and influential body of prose and drama in both French and English. Born in Dublin in 1906, Beckett abandoned a promising academic career to spend most of his life in Paris, evolving his characteristically mordant treatment of boredom, bodily decrepitude and the absurdity of human existence. The critical success of En attendant Godot in 1953 (staged in London as Waiting for Godot in 1955) transformed him from a relatively obscure experimental writer into a world-renowned dramatist and novelist. Beckett received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, and died in Paris in 1989. In this accessible guide to Beckett’s prose and drama, Sinead Mooney offers a concise and informative account of the development of Beckett’s oeuvre. She explores its two languages, prose and drama, from the erudite experiments of the early fiction through the major works and the radio and television plays, to the formidable minimalism of the late prose and drama.