Saturday, September 5, 2009

A Biography of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, April 13, 1906 in Dublin. He studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927. In 1928 he moved to Paris to take up the post of English lecturer in the Ecole Normale Superieure.

A mutual friend introduced him to James Joyce and he worked as his secretary, in 1929 Beckett published his first work which was a defence of Joyce's work and method. In 1930 he returned to Trinity as a lecturer, however citing habit and routine as a 'cancer of time', he quit his post and set out on a nomadic trawl across Europe, finally settling in Europe.

He joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by Germany, in August 1942 his unit was betrayed to the Gestapo, Beckett and Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil. In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit, during his visit he had a revelation in which his entire future literary direction appeared to him, he documented this in his 1958 play Krapp's Last Tape.

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 Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable and Mercier et Camier, two books of short stories and a book of criticism. He married Suzanne in 1961 in a secret civil ceremony in England and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He died in Paris in 1989.

Russell Shortt is a travel consultant with Exploring Ireland, the leading specialists in customised, private escorted tours, escorted coach tours and independent self drive tours of Ireland. Article source: http://www.exploringireland.net

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