Samuel Barclay Beckett

Family background

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish playwright, novelist and poet. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally minimalist, and, according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic about the human condition.

Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin into a well-off Protestant family. His father, William Beckett Jr., was an assessor. Beckett's mother, Mary Roe, had worked as a nurse before marriage. He was educated at the Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a B.A. degree in 1927, having specialized in French and Italian. Beckett worked as a teacher in Belfast and lecturer in English at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.

Major work:

Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly under the influence of the work of his friend James Joyce in that they are very erudite, sometimes seeming to display the author's learning merely for the sake of displaying it. As a result, they can, in places, be quite uncertain.

Beckett's work is bleak, basically minimalist, and, according to some interpretations, deeply cynical about the human condition. The supposed cynicism is diminished both by a great and often wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some readers, that Beckett's portrayal of life's obstacles serves to reveal that the journey, while complex, is finally worth the attempt. His later work explores his themes in an increasingly cryptic and attenuated style.

In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon became disappointed with his chosen academic vocation, however. Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, terminating his brief academic career. After leaving Trinity, Beckett began to travel in Europe. He also spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust.

Beckett's career as a novelist really began in 1938 with MURPHY, which illustrated the leading role's inner struggle between his desires for his prostitute-mistress and for total escape into the darkness of mind. The clash is resolute when he is atomized by a gas explosion.

Samuel Beckett's first play, Eleutheria, mirrors his own search for freedom, revolving around a young man's efforts to cut himself loose from his family and social obligations. His first real triumph, however, came on January 5, 1953, when Waiting for Godot premiered at the Theatre de Babylone. In spite of some expectations to the contrary, the strange little play in which "nothing happens" became an instant success, running for four hundred performances at the Theatre de Babylone and enjoying the critical praise of dramatists.

Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which period he wrote what are probably his most well-known works; and his late period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during which his works tended to become shorter and shorter and his style more and more minimalist.

Achievement:

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1969, "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama His play Waiting for Godot was the turning point in his work when it was a huge success after its first public performance n 1953.
Beckett was elected Saoi of Aosdana in 1984.