Samuel Barclay Beckett ( ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish playwright, novelist, and poet. Written in both English and French, his literary and theatrical works feature bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. As a key proponent of Irish literature, he is best known for his tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot (1953), and is widely regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century, credited with transforming modern theatre. For his foundational contribution to both literature and theatre, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."
During his early career, Beckett worked as a literary critic and commentator, and in 1930 he took up a role as a lecturer in Dublin. He wrote his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932, which influenced many of his later works, but it was not published until after his death. Around this time, Beckett also began studying artistic expressions and art history, particularly of paintings displayed at the National Gallery of Ireland. He was a close friend of the Irish writer James Joyce, and cited him as a major inspiration for his works. As a resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English, sometimes under the pseudonym Andrew Belis. His later literary works, especially his plays, became increasingly austere and minimalistic as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness, repetition and self-reference. During the Second World War, Beckett became a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945.
His works were well received by critics and theatre audiences during his own lifetime, and his career spanned both Ireland and France, with short stints in Germany and Italy. During these terms, Beckett collaborated with many leading actors, actresses and theatre directors for his plays. Beckett's works are known for their existential themes, and these made them an important part of 20th-century plays and dramas. In 1961, he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. He was also the first Saoi of the Aosdána, having been elected to the position in 1984.
Beckett is considered to be 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. He posthumously become one of the most prized and widely discussed Irish authors, and several landmarks have been named in his honor, with the most notable being the Samuel Beckett Bridge in Dublin. His best-known play, Waiting for Godot, has since become a centrepiece of modernist literature, and in a public poll by London's Royal National Theatre in 1998, it was voted as "the most significant English-language play of the 20th century."
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on 13 April 1906 in Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, to William Frank Beckett (1871–1933), a quantity surveyor of French Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe, an Irish nurse. His parents were both 35 when he was born, and had married in 1901. Beckett had one elder brother named Frank Edward (1902–1954). At the age of five, he attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, and then 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 perspective which informed his writing.
Beckett's family home, Cooldrinagh, was a large house and garden complete with a tennis court built in 1903 by Beckett's father. The house and garden, its surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station, and Harcourt Street station would all feature in his prose and plays.
Around 1919 or 1920, he went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, which Oscar Wilde had also attended. He left in 1923 and entered Trinity College Dublin, where he studied modern literature and Romance languages, and received his bachelor's degree in 1927. A natural athlete, he excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. Later, he played for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first-class cricket and thus to appear in Wisden.
Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927 (one of his tutors – not a teaching role in TCD – was the Berkeley scholar A. A. Luce, who introduced him to the work of Henri Bergson). He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. This meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake.
In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay titled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams). Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia. Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical transition. The next year he won a small literary prize for his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit.
In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. In November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme. It was a literary parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be "at odds with all that is clear and distinct in Descartes". Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience. When Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", which was inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published in The Dublin Magazine in 1934:
Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning
Beckett travelled throughout Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot. In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1992). Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.
Beckett published essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman, August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems (in The Dublin Magazine, July–September 1934). They focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.