Samuel Barclay Beckett ( / ˈ b ɛ k ɪ t / ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer, known for his work as a novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic. He wrote in both English and French. His stories and plays often showed sad, unemotional, and mix of sad and funny parts of life, along with dark humor and unusual language. Beckett is widely considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. He changed how modern theatre was created. He is best known for his play Waiting for Godot (1953). For his important contributions to literature and theatre, Beckett won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. The award recognized his work, which used new forms in novels and plays to explore the struggles of people in modern times.

Beckett began his career as a literary critic and teacher. In 1930, he became a lecturer in Dublin. He wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, in 1932. This book influenced his later works, but it was not published until after his death. Around this time, he studied art, especially paintings at the National Gallery of Ireland. He was a close friend of the famous Irish writer James Joyce, who inspired much of his work. Beckett lived most of his adult life in Paris, where he wrote in both French and English. Sometimes, he used the name Andrew Belis when writing. As his career continued, his plays became more simple and plain, using new ways to write, such as stream of consciousness, repetition, and references to himself. During World War II, Beckett joined a French Resistance group called Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). For his bravery, he was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949.

Beckett’s work was praised by critics and theatre audiences during his lifetime. He lived and worked in Ireland and France, with short periods in Germany and Italy. He worked with many actors, actresses, and directors, including Jack MacGowran, Billie Whitelaw, Jocelyn Herbert, and Walter Asmus. His plays often explored deep questions about life and human existence, making them important in 20th-century theatre. In 1961, he shared the first Prix International award with Jorge Luis Borges. He was also the first Saoi of the Aosdána, a position he was elected to in 1984.

Beckett is seen as one of the last modernist writers and a key figure in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd." He died in 1989 and was buried at the Cimetière du Montparnasse. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot, is now a central part of modernist literature. In a public poll by London’s Royal National Theatre in 1998, it was voted the "most significant English-language play of the 20th century."

Early life

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin. He was the son of William Frank Beckett (1871–1933), a land surveyor of Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse. Both of his parents were 35 years old when he was born, and they married in 1901. Beckett had one older brother named Frank Edward (1902–1954). At age five, he attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he began learning music. Later, he moved to Earlsfort House School near Harcourt Street in Dublin. The Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland. Raised as an Anglican, Beckett later became agnostic, a belief that influenced his writing.

Beckett’s family home, Cooldrinagh, was a large house with a garden and a tennis court built by his father in 1903. The house, garden, surrounding countryside, nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, Foxrock railway station, and Harcourt Street station all appeared in his writing.

Around 1919 or 1920, Beckett attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, a school also attended by Oscar Wilde. He left in 1923 and entered Trinity College Dublin, where he studied modern literature and Romance languages. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1927. Beckett was a talented athlete who played cricket as a left-handed batsman and bowler. He played for Dublin University and participated in two first-class cricket matches against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first-class cricket and to be listed in Wisden.

Early writings

Samuel Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927. One of his teachers was A. A. Luce, an expert on the philosopher Henri Bergson, who introduced Beckett to Bergson’s work. In 1926, Beckett was chosen as a Scholar in Modern Languages. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and briefly taught at Campbell College in Belfast before becoming a lecturer of English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While in Paris, Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and friend of Beckett, introduced him to Irish author James Joyce. This meeting greatly influenced Beckett, who later helped Joyce with research for his book Finnegans Wake.

In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay titled “Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce.” The essay defended Joyce’s writing style against criticism. It was part of a book of essays about Joyce, which included contributions from other writers. Beckett’s relationship with Joyce and his family grew colder after he refused to pursue a romantic relationship with Joyce’s daughter, Lucia. Beckett’s first short story, “Assumption,” appeared in a literary magazine called Transition. The next year, he won a small prize for a poem titled “Whoroscope,” which was inspired by a biography of the philosopher René Descartes.

In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. In November 1930, he gave a speech in French to the Modern Languages Society about a fictional poet named Jean du Chas and a movement called le Concentrisme. Beckett created the poet and movement himself, claiming they opposed the clarity of Descartes’ ideas. He later said he did not mean to trick his audience. Beckett left Trinity College in 1931, ending his academic career. He wrote a poem titled “Gnome” to mark this time, inspired by a book by Johann Wolfgang Goethe. The poem was published in The Dublin Magazine in 1934.

Beckett traveled across Europe. In 1931, he published a critical study of French author Marcel Proust titled Proust. Two years later, after his father’s death, he began therapy with a psychoanalyst named Dr. Wilfred Bion. Themes from this experience appeared in his later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot. In 1932, Beckett wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but abandoned it after publishers rejected it. The novel influenced his early poems and his 1933 collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks.

Beckett wrote essays and reviews, including “Recent Irish Poetry” and “Humanistic Quietism.” These pieces discussed the work of Irish poets such as Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Blanaid Salkeld. He compared them favorably to earlier Irish writers and linked them to modernist influences like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Beckett described these poets as the beginning of a modern Irish literary movement.

In 1935, Beckett published a book of poetry titled Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates. That same year, he worked on his novel Murphy. In 1936, he wrote to film director Sergei Eisenstein, offering to study with him in Moscow. His letter was lost, however, due to a smallpox outbreak and Eisenstein’s focus on another project. Around this time, Beckett read the work of philosopher Arnold Geulincx, whose name appears in Murphy. The novel was completed in 1936, and Beckett traveled through Germany, recording observations about art and the rise of Nazi violence. He returned briefly to Ireland in 1937 and oversaw the publication of Murphy in 1938. He translated the book into French the following year and later moved permanently to Paris. Beckett stayed in Paris during World War II, preferring “France at war” to “Ireland at peace.” He became a familiar figure in Parisian cafés, where he deepened his friendship with James Joyce and formed new connections with artists like Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp. Around December 1937, Beckett had a brief romantic relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him “Oblomov” after a character in a novel.

In January 1938, Beckett was stabbed in the chest in Paris after refusing to comply with a pimp named Prudent. James Joyce arranged for Beckett to stay in a private hospital room. The incident attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, with whom Beckett began a lifelong partnership. At a court hearing, Beckett asked Prudent why he was attacked. Prudent replied, “I do not know, sir. I apologize.” Beckett later dropped the charges against him. In 2022, author Salman Rushdie referenced Beckett’s decision not to interview his attacker after surviving a similar stabbing.

The 1930s were a time of artistic growth for Beckett. He studied art history, visiting Ireland’s National Gallery and exploring Dutch Golden Age paintings. In 1933, he applied for a job as an assistant curator at London’s National Gallery. Later, he traveled to Germany, studying art in galleries and private collections. His interest in visual art influenced his writing and led to collaborations with artists like Joan Mitchell and Geneviève Asse.

World War II and French Resistance

After Germany occupied France in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance and worked as a messenger for the Réseau Gloria network. Over the next two years, he faced several close calls with the Gestapo. In August 1942, his network was betrayed, and he and Suzanne fled on foot to the village of Roussillon in Vaucluse for safety. While living in Roussillon for two years, Beckett helped the Maquis carry out secret missions to disrupt German forces in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely discussed his wartime activities later in life. For his efforts, the French government honored him with the Croix de guerre and the Resistance Medal. However, Beckett always described his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff."

While hiding in Roussillon, Beckett continued writing the novel Watt. He began the novel in 1941 and finished it in 1945, but it was not published until 1953. A portion of the novel appeared in the Dublin literary magazine Envoy before its full release. After the war, Beckett returned to France in 1946 and worked as a store manager at the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-Lô. He later described his experiences in an unpublished radio script titled The Capital of the Ruins.

Fame: novels and the theatre

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a short visit. During his time there, he had a realization in his mother’s room: he saw the direction his future work in literature would take. Beckett had felt he would always remain in the shadow of Joyce, believing he could never match Joyce’s achievements. His realization led him to change his path and accept his own limitations and his interest in ignorance and helplessness. He said:

"I realized that Joyce had reached the farthest point in gaining knowledge and controlling his material. He always added more to his work; you can see this in his proofs. I realized my own path was in reducing knowledge, in taking away rather than adding."

Knowlson explains that Beckett was rejecting Joyce’s belief that gaining more knowledge was a way to understand and control the world. In the future, Beckett’s work would focus on themes like poverty, failure, exile, and loss, as he described people as "non-knowers" and "non-can-ers." This moment is considered a key turning point in his career. Beckett later fictionalized this experience in his play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). In the play, Krapp listens to a tape he made earlier and hears his younger self say, "clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most…" He then skips ahead on the tape (before the audience can hear the full line). Beckett later told Knowlson that the missing words are "precious ally."

In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps modernes published the first part of Beckett’s short story "Suite" (later renamed "La Fin," or "The End"). The magazine did not realize Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story. Co-editor Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. Beckett also began writing his fourth novel, Mercier et Camier, which was not published until 1970. This novel came before his most famous work, the play En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), written shortly after. Mercier et Camier was Beckett’s first long work written in French, the language he used for most of his later works. His French publisher, Jérôme Lindon, supported his writing, including the "trilogy" of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), later translated as Malone Dies (1958); and L’innommable (1953), later translated as The Unnamable (1960). Beckett wrote in French, even though he was a native English speaker, because he said it helped him write "without style."

Waiting for Godot, like most of Beckett’s works after 1947, was first written in French. He worked on the play between October 1948 and January 1949. His partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, played a key role in its success. She became his agent and sent the manuscript to many producers until they met Roger Blin, who would later direct the play.

Blin’s knowledge of French theater and his vision, along with Beckett’s clear ideas about the play’s meaning, helped it succeed. A famous critic, Vivian Mercier, wrote that Beckett "achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What’s more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." The play was published in 1952 and first performed in Paris in 1953. An English translation was performed two years later. The play was a critical and popular success in Paris, though it received mostly negative reviews when it opened in London in 1955. The tide turned with positive reviews from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times and later from Kenneth Tynan. After its performance in Miami, the play became very popular, with successful shows in the U.S. and Germany. The play is widely performed and has inspired many playwrights worldwide. It is the only play for which Beckett never sold, donated, or gave away the manuscript. He refused to allow the play to be made into a film but allowed it to be shown on television.

In the 1950s, Beckett sometimes drove local children to school. One of these children was André Roussimoff, who later became a famous wrestler known as André the Giant. Beckett and Roussimoff shared a love for cricket and often talked about it. Beckett translated all of his works into English himself, except for Molloy, which he translated with Patrick Bowles. The success of Waiting for Godot opened new opportunities for Beckett in theater. He went on to write successful full-length plays, including Fin de partie (Endgame) (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958, written in English), Happy Days (1961, also written in English), and Play (1963). In 1961, Beckett received the International Publishers’ Formentor Prize for his work, which he shared with Jorge Luis Borges.

Later life and death

The 1960s were a time of change for Beckett, both in his personal life and as a writer. In 1961, he married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England. The ceremony was kept private because of rules about French inheritance law. His successful plays led to invitations to watch rehearsals and productions worldwide, which eventually helped him start a new career as a theatre director. In 1957, he received his first commission from the BBC Third Programme for a radio play called All That Fall. He continued writing for radio and expanded his work to include movies and television. He began writing in English again, though he also wrote in French until the end of his life. In 1953, he bought land near a small village about 60 kilometers (40 miles) northeast of Paris and built a cottage with the help of local people.

From the late 1950s until his death, Beckett had a relationship with Barbara Bray, a widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC. Knowlson wrote that she was small and attractive, but most importantly, very intelligent and well-read. Beckett was immediately drawn to her, and she to him. Their meeting was important for both of them, as it marked the start of a relationship that lasted alongside his marriage to Suzanne for the rest of his life. Bray died in Edinburgh on February 25, 2010.

In 1969, the avant-garde filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim made an experimental short film about Beckett, which he named after the writer.

In October 1969, while on vacation in Tunis with Suzanne, Beckett learned he had won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. Suzanne, who was very private, called the award a "catastrophe" because she feared it would bring unwanted attention to her husband. Although Beckett rarely gave interviews, he sometimes met with artists, scholars, and fans who visited him in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques in Paris. This was near his home in Montparnasse, where he arranged meetings and often had lunch. Despite being very private, a review of the second volume of his letters by Roy Foster, published in the December 15, 2011, issue of The New Republic, showed that Beckett was often friendly and willing to discuss his work and creative process.

Suzanne died on July 17, 1989. Beckett, who was in a nursing home and suffered from emphysema and possibly Parkinson’s disease, died on December 22, 1989. They were buried together in the cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. Their gravestone is simple and made of gray granite, as Beckett requested: "any color, so long as it's grey."

Works

Samuel Beckett’s career as a writer can be divided into three main periods. The first period includes his early works, written before the end of World War II in 1945. His middle period began in 1945 and lasted until the early 1960s, during which he wrote his most famous works. His final period started in the early 1960s and continued until his death in 1989. During this time, his writing became shorter and simpler in style.

Beckett’s earliest works were strongly influenced by his friend James Joyce. These works are full of complex ideas and references to other books, which can make them difficult to understand. For example, the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934) includes a passage that references Dante’s Commedia, a book many readers may not know. This passage shows Beckett’s interest in characters who are physically inactive and deeply lost in their thoughts, themes that appear in his later works.

Beckett’s first novel, Murphy (1938), explores themes like insanity and chess, which he would revisit later. The novel’s opening line, “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” hints at the dark humor and pessimism found in many of his works. Watt, written during World War II, shares similar themes but uses a more straightforward style. It examines movement as if it were a mathematical problem, a focus that appears in his later works.

In 1930, Beckett wrote an essay titled Proust, which was influenced by the ideas of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Around this time, Beckett began writing in French. His French poems from the late 1930s are simpler than his earlier English poems, showing that he was gradually simplifying his style. This change is also seen in Watt.

After World War II, Beckett focused more on writing in French. This shift, along with a personal realization in his mother’s room in Dublin, led to the creation of his most famous works. These works include four major plays: En attendant Godot (1948–1949; Waiting for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame), Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). These plays are often linked to the “Theatre of the Absurd,” a term coined by Martin Esslin. Esslin argued that Beckett’s plays reflected the ideas of Albert Camus, who discussed the concept of “the absurd.” However, Beckett did not fully agree with existentialist philosophy, even though his work shares some themes with it.

Beckett’s plays from this period explore themes of despair and the will to survive in a confusing world. A character in Endgame says, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness… we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it’s always the same thing.” This quote captures the central themes of his middle period.

During this time, Beckett also wrote three novels: Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies), and L’innommable (1953; The Unnamable). These novels are part of a group sometimes called a “trilogy,” though Beckett did not support this label. The writing in these books becomes simpler over time. Molloy still includes elements of traditional storytelling, while The Unnamable focuses almost entirely on a character’s thoughts and the struggle between speaking and silence. The final line of The Unnamable—“you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on”—shows a determination to continue living despite hardship.

After these novels, Beckett struggled to write long prose works for many years. His short pieces from this time were later collected as Texts for Nothing. In 1961, he wrote Comment c'est (How It Is), a radical work describing a narrator crawling through mud with a sack of food. The text uses very short, unpunctuated sentences, such as: “You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark.” This work marked the end of Beckett’s middle period.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Beckett’s writing became even more concise, a style sometimes called “minimalist.” One example is the 1969 play Breath, which lasts only a few seconds.

Collaborators

Jack MacGowran was the first actor to perform a one-man show inspired by the works of Samuel Beckett. He first performed End of Day in Dublin in 1962 and later revised it as Beginning To End in 1965. The show was revised again before Beckett directed it in Paris in 1970. MacGowran received the 1970–1971 Obie Award for Best Performance by an Actor for his performance of Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett on Broadway. Beckett wrote the radio play Embers and the teleplay Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran. The actor also performed in productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and gave readings of Beckett’s plays and poems on BBC Radio. In 1966, he recorded the LP MacGowran Speaking Beckett for Claddagh Records.

Billie Whitelaw worked with Beckett for 25 years on plays such as Not I, Eh Joe, Footfalls, and Rockaby. She first met Beckett in 1963. In her autobiography Billie Whitelaw… Who He?, she described their first meeting as "trust at first sight." Beckett wrote many of his experimental plays for her. She became known as his muse, the "supreme interpreter of his work," and is most famous for her role as the mouth in Not I. She described Rockaby as a play where she "put the tape in my head" and looked in a specific way, not at the audience. She said of Footfalls: "I felt like a moving, musical Edvard Munch painting," and noted that Beckett directed her as if he were "painting" with a brush. She explained that she worked hard to give Beckett what he wanted, saying, "With all of Sam's work, the scream was there, my task was to try to get it out." She stopped performing his plays in 1989, the year Beckett died.

Jocelyn Herbert, an English stage designer, was a close friend and influence on Beckett until his death. She worked with him on plays such as Happy Days (their third project) and Krapp's Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre. Beckett said Herbert became his closest friend in England: "She has a great feeling for the work and is very sensitive and doesn't want to bang the nail on the head. Generally speaking, there is a tendency on the part of designers to overstate, and this has never been the case with Jocelyn."

Walter D. Asmus, a German director, began working with Beckett at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in 1974 and continued until 1989, the year of Beckett’s death. Asmus directed many of Beckett’s plays internationally.

Legacy

Samuel Beckett is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. His work strongly challenged the realist tradition, which focuses on realistic stories and settings. Instead, Beckett created plays and stories that did not follow traditional plots or strict rules about time and place. He focused on showing important parts of what it means to be human. Many famous writers, including Václav Havel, John Banville, and Harold Pinter, have said they were influenced by Beckett’s work. His ideas also inspired many writers, artists, and musicians from the 1950s onward, including members of the Beat generation and artists involved in experimental performances in the 1960s. In Ireland, Beckett influenced poets like Derek Mahon and Thomas Kinsella, as well as writers who followed modernist traditions instead of realist ones.

Many famous composers, such as Luciano Berio and Philip Glass, created music based on Beckett’s writings. His work also influenced many international writers, artists, and filmmakers, including Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, and J. M. Coetzee. Beckett is one of the most widely discussed and respected writers of the 20th century. His work has divided opinions among critics. Some, like Jean-Paul Sartre and Theodor Adorno, praised him for showing the absurdity of life and for refusing simple answers. Others, like Georg Lukács, criticized him for not following realist traditions.

After Beckett’s death, all rights to perform his plays are managed by his family, led by his nephew, Edward Beckett. This group controls how his plays are performed and does not allow productions that change his stage directions. In 2004, scientists studied Beckett’s DNA to learn more about his family history.

Photographer John Minihan took many well-known pictures of Beckett between 1980 and 1985. Another famous photo was taken by John Haynes during a play rehearsal. This image appears on the cover of a book about Beckett’s life. In 1994, Ireland’s postal service released a stamp honoring Beckett. In 2006, Ireland’s Central Bank created special coins to celebrate Beckett’s 100th birthday.

In 2009, a new bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin was named the Samuel Beckett Bridge. It was designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, who also designed the James Joyce Bridge. The bridge’s opening ceremony included Beckett’s family, poet Seamus Heaney, and actor Barry McGovern. A ship in Ireland’s navy, the LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61), is also named after him. A blue plaque remembering Beckett is located at Portora Royal School in Northern Ireland, where he studied.

In the French town of La Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where Beckett lived, a public library and a high school are named after him. The Happy Days Enniskillen International Beckett Festival, held every year in Northern Ireland, celebrates Beckett’s work and influence. The festival started in 2011 and is held in Enniskillen, where Beckett studied.

In 1983, the Samuel Beckett Award was created to honor writers who show creativity and skill in performing arts. In 2003, the Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust was formed to support new plays at the Barbican Centre in London.

Music for three of Beckett’s plays—Words and Music, Cascando, and …but the clouds…—was composed by Martin Pearlman. This music was created for Beckett’s 100th birthday and performed in New York and at Harvard University.

In 2022, a film called Dance First, directed by James Marsh and written by Neil Forsyth, was released. The movie tells the story of Beckett’s life, with actors Gabriel Byrne and Fionn O’Shea playing him at different ages. The film was shown on Sky Cinema in 2023.

Archives

Samuel Beckett's long and productive career is found in archives all over the world. Important collections are located at the Harry Ransom Center, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Reading, Trinity College Dublin, and Houghton Library. Because these collections are spread out, people have worked to create an online collection through the University of Antwerp.