Krapp's Last Tape | Author Biography

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born at Cooldrinagh (his family’s home) in Foxrock, a town in County Dublin, Ireland; although there is some confusion over the true date of his birth, Beckett always held that he was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906. A talented athlete, Beckett’s body developed as steadily as his mind: after completing secondary school, Beckett entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he excelled in French and Italian. In 1928, he moved to Paris to study and teach at the Ecole Normal Superieure this move to Paris was a key event in Beckett’s life, for he lived the rest of it almost exclusively in France.

Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett

While in Paris, Beckett met and befriended James Joyce the Irish poet, short-story writer, and novelist, who was then composing Finnegans Wake, a difficult novel that Beckett helped its author translate into French. While working with Joyce, Beckett composed ‘‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’’ (1929), his first foray into criticism. His own work soon followed: ‘‘Whoroscope’’ (1930), a poem about the nature of time, Proust (1931) an examina- tion of the great French novelist, and Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932, published 1993), his first novel, parts of which were revised into a collection of short stories titled More Pricks than Kicks and published, to almost no audience, in 1934.

Trouble with publishers and sales did not dissuade Beckett, however, from further projects. In 1938 his novel Murphy was published to mixed reviews (it had been previously rejected by fortytwo publishers). Once World War II began, Beckett found little time to write and worked with a cell of the French Resistance; he narrowly escaped capture by the Gestapo on more than one occasion. He composed much of the novel Watt (published 1953) during this time.

After the war, Beckett began a period of fruitful composition, writing in French and then translating his work into English. Although his first play, Eleutheria, was composed in 1947 but not published until after Beckett’s death, his second play, Waiting for Godot, (published 1952, first produced 1953) proved to be Beckett’s most discussed, analyzed, and talked-about work; the play concerning a pair of tramps who wait in an unspecified place for a man named Godot who may or may not exist and does not ever arrive caused great controversy when brought to the United States in 1956. His famous trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, were also composed during this period; all three were published in English by 1958.

For the rest of his life, Beckett continued to write in French and experiment with both prose and dramatic forms. His next major play, Endgame (published 1957), concerns a blind autocrat, trapped in a room with his parents who reside in dustbins; Krapp’s Last Tape depicts an old man listening to a thirty-year-old recording of himself; Happy Days (1961) features a woman who delivers a long monologue while simultaneously being buried up to her neck in a mound of earth. Other experimental work followed, such as the television play Eh, Joe? (1966), the thirty-five-seconds-long Breath (1970) and the novel Mercier and Camier (1970). In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; the following year marked the publication of his Collected Works in sixteen volumes. During the last phase of his career, Beckett continued to intrigue (and occasionally frustrate) audiences and readers with the prose works Worstward Ho (1983), Stirrings Still (1991), and Nohow On (1993) and the plays Footfalls (1976), Rockabye (1981), and Ohio Impromptu (1981). Beckett died at home in France on December 22, 1989. He has come to be regarded as one of the giants of twentieth-century literature and, as the title of Anthony Cronin’s 1996 book suggests, ‘‘The Last Modernist.’’