Beckett, Samuel (Vol. 1) - Beckett, Samuel 1906–

Beckett, Samuel 1906–

Nobel Prize-winning playwright and novelist, Beckett is a transplanted Dubliner who has lived in Paris since 1937 and has written almost exclusively in French. His absurdist comedy focuses on solitude, silence, meaninglessness, and despair. Waiting for Godot is his best-known work. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)

Even though Samuel Beckett as a dramatist has frequently taken critical precedence over Beckett as a novelist, it is in his six novels that his originality is demonstrated; the plays merely add a footnote to what the novels indicate with greater range and force. The plays themselves—Waiting For Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Act Without Words, for example—are fragments of the novels, episodes submerged in the larger context. The real Beckett—if one presumes to define him—is the novelist who almost arbitrarily broke off segments of his fiction and labeled them...

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