Samuel Beckett Popular Books
Samuel Beckett Biography & Facts
Samuel Barclay Beckett ( ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949. He was awarded 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". In 1961 he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. He was the first person to be elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. Early life Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on 13 April 1906, the son of William Frank Beckett (1871–1933), a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse. His parents were both 35 when he was born, and had married in 1901. Beckett had one older 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. Early writings 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 renowned 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. In 1935—the year that he successfully published a book of his poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates—Beckett worked on his novel Murphy. In May, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with.... Discover the Samuel Beckett popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Samuel Beckett books.
Best Seller Samuel Beckett Books of 2024
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Athena
John BanvilleFrom the Booker Prizewinning author of The Sea comes a mesmerizing novel that is both a literary thriller and a love story as sumptuously perverse as Lolita. "A strange ...
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Philosophy and Social Hope
Richard RortyRichard Rorty is one of the most provocative figures in recent philosophical, literary and cultural debate. This collection brings together those of his writings aimed at a wider a...
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Medea and Other Plays
Euripides & Philip VellacottMedea/Hecabe/Electra/HeraclesFour devastating Greek tragedies showing the powerful brought down by betrayal, jealousy, guilt and hatredThe first playwright to depict suffering with...
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Nora
Nuala O'ConnorNamed one of the best books of historical fiction by the New York TimesAcclaimed Irish novelist Nuala O’Connor’s bold reimagining of the life of James Joyce’s wife, muse, and the m...
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Samuel Beckett
François BruzzoIrlandais de naissance, Samuel Beckett élut assez tôt résidence en France, et lorsqu'il obtint le prix Nobel de littérature en 1969, il préféra être regardé comme un écrivain franç...
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The Erotic Poems
Ovid & Peter GreenThis collection of Ovid's poems deals with the whole spectrum of sexual desire, ranging from deeply emotional declarations of eternal devotion to flippant arguments for promiscuity...
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Samuel Beckett
Pascale CasanovaIn this fascinating new exploration of Samuel Beckett’s work, Pascale Casanova argues that Beckett’s reputation rests on a pervasive misreading of his oeuvre, w...
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The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett
Dirk Van HulleIn the past decade, there has been an unprecedented upsurge of interest in Samuel Beckett's works. The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett offers an accessible and engrossing...
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Samuel Beckett
Eugene WebbCollectively the works of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, reveal a remarkable continuity of theme. Together his writings present a particular view of...
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The Funeral Party
Ludmila UlitskayaAugust 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, es...
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Samuel Beckett
Andrew GibsonWriter Samuel Beckett (1906–89) is known for depicting a world of abject misery, failure, and absurdity in his many plays, novels, short stories, and poetry. Yet the despair in his...
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The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett
Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, has produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the sh...
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Lysistrata and Other Plays
Aristophanes & Alan H. SommersteinThe Acharnians/The Clouds/Lysistrata'We women have the salvation of Greece in our hands'Writing at a time of political and social crisis in Athens, the ancient Greek comic playwrig...
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The Anatomy of Melancholy
Robert Burton & Angus Gowland'The best book ever written' Nicholas Lezard, GuardianRobert Burton's labyrinthine, beguiling, playful masterpiece is his attempt to 'anatomize and cut up' every aspect of the cond...
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The Temptation to Exist
E. M. Cioran & Richard HowardThis collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizati...
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Malina
Ingeborg Bachmann & Philip BoehmNow a New Directions book, the legendary novel that is “equal to the best of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett” (New York Times Book Review) In Malina, originally publish...
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Samuel Beckett
R. Federman & L. GraverThis set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as indi...
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Languages of Truth
Salman RushdieNewly collected, revised, and expanded nonfiction from the first two decades of the twentyfirst centuryincluding many texts never previously in printby the Booker Prize–winning, in...
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The Sickness Unto Death
Søren Kierkegaard & Alastair HannayOne of the most remarkable philosophical works of the nineteenth century, The Sickness Unto Death is also famed for the depth and acuity of its modern psychological insights. Writi...
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Samuel Beckett
Jennifer M. Jeffers & Kimball KingSamuel Beckett: A Casebook may be characterized as a new collection of essays by a generation of Beckett scholars who did not have access to the author. This text demarcates the li...
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Samuel Beckett
Rosemarie BodenheimerA book on the experience of reading the works of Samuel Beckett that covers key topics including Beckett's treatment of human emotion, the importance of doubt and second though...
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En attendant Godot de Samuel Beckett
lePetitLitteraireTestez vos connaissances sur En attendant Godot de Samuel Beckett !Ce questionnaire de lecture sur En attendant Godot de Samuel Beckett vous aidera à : vérifier votre compréhension...
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Samuel Beckett
David PattieSamuel Beckett's work forever changed the concepts of literature and theatre. His work remains a core part of introductory courses on literary history, drama, theatre or performan...
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Orestes and Other Plays
EuripidesWritten during the long battles with Sparta that were to ultimately destroy ancient Athens, these six plays by Euripides brilliantly utilize traditional legends to illustrate the f...
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The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett
John CalderIncreasingly Samuel Beckett’s writing is seen as the culmination of the great literature of the twentieth century – succeeding the work of Proust, Joyce and Kafka. Beckett is a wri...
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Camera Man
Dana StevensNamed a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker, Publishers Weekly, and NPRIn this genredefying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclai...
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David Copperfield
Charles DickensNow a major film directed by Armando Iannucci, starring Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi and Ben Whishaw'The greatest achievement of the greatest of all novelis...
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Samuel Beckett
André MarisselCet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.
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Samuel Beckett
Laura SalisburyReads Beckett's comic timing as part of a postwar ethics of representation; Samuel Beckett is a funny writer. He is also an author whose work is taken to respond ethically to the u...
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New Science
Giambattista Vico & David MarshBarely acknowledged in his lifetime, the New Science of Giambattista Vico (16681744) is an astonishingly perceptive and ambitious attempt to decipher the history, mythology and law...
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The Tender Hour of Twilight
Richard Seaver & Jeannette SeaverFrom Beckett to Burroughs, The Story of O to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, an iconic literary troublemaker tells the colorful stories behind the storiesRichard Seaver came to Par...
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Finnegans Wake
James JoyceA daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyce's Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyce...
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Ecce Homo
Friedrich Nietzsche & R. J. HollingdaleIn late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Nietzsche (18441900) set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains one of the most intriguing yet biz...
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The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro
Pierre-Augustin BeaumarchaisA French courtier, secret agent, libertine and adventurer, Beaumarchais (173299) was also author of two sparkling plays about the scoundrelly valet Figaro triumphant successes tha...
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Travelers in the Third Reich
Julia BoydTravelers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating firsthand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, inclu...
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As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Susan Sontag & David RieffThis, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag's journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag's evo...
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Samuel Beckett
Jennifer Birkett & Kate InceBringing together seminal writings on Beckett from the 1950s and 1960s with critical readings from the 1980s and 1990s, this collection is inspired by a wide variety of liter...
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The Joyce Girl
Annabel Abbs“Abbs has found a gripping and littleknown story at the heart of one of the 20th century’s most astonishing creative moments, researched it deeply, and brought the extraordinary Jo...
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Parisian Lives
Deirdre BairA PULITZER PRIZE FINALISTA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the YearNational Book Awardwinning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with S...
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Utilitarianism and Other Essays
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill & Alan RyanOne of the most important nineteenthcentury schools of thought, Utilitarianism propounds the view that the value or rightness of an action rests in how well it promotes the welfare...
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A Country Road, A Tree
Jo BakerFrom the bestselling author of Longbourn comes a story of survival and determination, of spies and artists, passion and dangera portrait of Samuel Beckett’s wartime experiences in ...
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The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989
Samuel Beckett & S. E. GontarskiNobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousne...