BIOGRAPHY
 
 
 

  Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906, near
  Dublin, Ireland. Raised in a middle class, Protestant home, the son of
  a quantity surveyor and a nurse, he was sent off at the age of 14 to
  attend the same school which Oscar Wilde had attended. Looking
  back on his childhood, he once remarked, "I had little talent for
  happiness."

 Beckett was consistent in his loneliness. The unhappy boy soon grew
  into an unhappy young man, often so depressed that he stayed in bed
 until mid afternoon. He was difficult to engage in any lengthy
  conversation--it took hours and lots of drinks to warm him up--but the women could not
  resist him. The lonely young poet, however, would not allow anyone to penetrate his
  solitude. He once remarked, after rejecting advances from James Joyce's daughter, that he
  was dead and had no feelings that were human.

  In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. Shortly after
  he arrived, a mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce, and Beckett quickly became an
  apostle of the older writer. At the age of 23, he wrote an essay in defense of Joyce's
  magnum opus against the public's lazy demand for easy comprehensibility. A year later, he
  won his first literary prize--10 pounds for a poem entitled "Whoroscope" which dealt with
  the philosopher Descartes meditating on the subject of time and the transiency of life. After
  writing a study of Proust, however, Beckett came to the conclusion that habit and routine
  were the "cancer of time", so he gave up his post at Trinity College and set out on a
  nomadic journey across Europe.

  Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing
  poems and stories and doing odd jobs to get by. In the course of his journies, he no doubt
  came into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these aquaintances would later
  translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris,
  he would call on Joyce, and they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they
  mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.

  Beckett finally settled down in Paris in 1937. Shortly thereafter, he was stabbed in the street
  by a man who had approached him asking for money. He would learn later, in the hospital,
  that he had a perforated lung. After his recovery, he went to visit his assailant in prison.
  When asked why he had attacked Beckett, the prisoner replied "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur",
  a phrase hauntingly reminiscent of some of the lost and confused souls that would populate
  the writer's later works.

  During World War II, Beckett stayed in Paris--even after it had become occupied by the
  Germans. He joined the underground movement and fought for the resistance until 1942
  when several members of his group were arrested and he was forced to flee with his
  French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after it had been liberated from the
  Germans, he returned to Paris and began his most prolific period as a writer. In the five
  years that followed, he wrote Eleutheria, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, the novels
  Malloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Mercier et Camier, two books of short
  stories, and a book of criticism.

  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 Théâtre 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 Théâtre de Babylone and enjoying the critical praise of dramatists as
  diverse as Tennessee Williams, Jean Anouilh, Thornton Wilder, and William Saroyan who
  remarked, "It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theatre."
  Perhaps the most famous production of Waiting for Godot, however, took place in 1957
  when a company of actors from the San Francisco Actor's Workshop presented the play at
  the San Quentin penitentiary for an audience of over fourteen hundred convicts.
  Surprisingly, the production was a great success. The prisoners understood as well as
  Vladimir and Estragon that life means waiting, killing time and clinging to the hope that relief
  may be just around the corner. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow.

  Beckett secured his position as a master dramatist on April 3, 1957 when his second
  masterpiece, Endgame, premiered (in French) at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
  Although English was his native language, all of Beckett's major works were originally
  written in French--a curious phenomenon since Beckett's mother tongue was the accepted
  international language of the twentieth century. Apparently, however, he wanted the
  discipline and economy of expression that an acquired language would force upon on him.

  Beckett's dramatic works do not rely on the traditional elements of drama. He trades in
  plot, characterization, and final solution, which had hitherto been the hallmarks of drama, for
  a series of concrete stage images. Language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe
  peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the unexpressable. His
  characters exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of
  bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication, then crawling
  on, endlessly.

  Beckett was the first of the absurdists to win international fame. His works have been
  translated into over twenty languages. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
  Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, but the task grew more and more
  difficult with each work until, in the end, he said that each word seemed to him "an
  unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."www.imagi-nation.com/