A multiple resource site for all those interested in the life and works of Samuel Beckett. It also houses the official page of The Samuel Beckett Society.

Samuel Beckett 1906-1989
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~vfores/beckett.html

These notes on Beckett's life and writings also include links to biographies, bibliographies, articles, and essays.

Bohemian Ink: Samuel Beckett
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/beckett.htm

This site includes links and a bibliography for the author of Waiting for Godot.

The Samuel Beckett Society
http://beckett.english.ucsb.edu/society.html

The Samuel Beckett Society is an international organization of scholars, students, directors, actors, and others who share an interest in his work.

The Samuel Beckett Online Resources and Links Page
http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/Beck_Links.html

This site offers links to online essays, reviews, analyses, and other material related to the works of Beckett.

Endgame
http://home.sprintmail.com/~lifeform/endgame.html

A version of the text of Beckett's famous one-act play is available here.

BIOGRAPHY
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was born in Dublin to an upper-middle-class Protestant family. After a privileged education at the Portora Royal School, he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied French and Italian. He was an exceptionally good student and in 1928, after graduation, went to Paris to teach English at the École Normale Supérieure, an unusual reward for good scholarship.

When he was first in France, Beckett's reading of French philosophers, especially Descartes, exerted a strong influence on his work. Beckett's earliest writings appeared in Eugene Jolas's avant-garde literary journal transition, which put him in the center of Parisian literary activity in the late 1920s. After 1930, his series of short stories published under the title More Pricks Than Kicks (1934) established him as an important writer. After settling in Paris in 1937, Beckett wrote the novel Murphy (1938) on a recognizably Irish theme of economic impoverishment, alienation, and inward meditation and spiritual complexity.

When World War II began in 1939, Beckett took up the cause of the French Resistance. His activity caught the eye of the Gestapo, and for two years he lay low in unoccupied France by working as a farmhand and also writing another novel, Watt (written in 1944 but published in 1953). After the war he took up residence again in Paris and began writing most of his work in French. His greatest novels were written in the five years after the war, and they are often referred to as his trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. These three novels are about men who have become disaffected with society and who have strange and compelling urgencies to be alone and to follow exacting and repetitive patterns of behavior. In a sense, they are archetypes of the kinds of heroes—if "heroes" can be used—that Beckett created in most of his work.

Beckett's first published play, Waiting for Godot (1952), was produced in Paris (1953), in London (1955), and in Miami (1956). From the first, its repetitive, whimsical, and sometimes nonsensical style established the play as a major postwar statement. In a barren setting, Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps who echo the comic vision of Charlie Chaplin, wait for Godot to come.

The comic moments in the play, along with the enigma of Vladimir and Estragon's fruitless waiting, combined to capture the imagination of audiences and the press. They saw the play as a modern statement about the condition of humankind, although there was never any agreement on just what the statement was. Most audiences saw Godot as a metaphor for God. Despite the critics' constant inquiries, Beckett was careful never to confirm the view that Godot was God and to keep Godot's identity open-ended.

Many of the themes in Waiting for Godot are apparent in Beckett's later plays. The radio play All That Fall (1957) was followed by the very successful Krapp's Last Tape (1958). Also in 1957, Endgame, a play on the themes of the end of the world, was produced, followed in 1961 by Happy Days. Beckett experimented with minimalist approaches to drama, exemplified in Act without Words I and Act without Words II, both mime plays. Other plays experiment with minimalism in setting, props, and—in the mime plays—even words.