SAMUEL BECKETT
(DUBLIN 1906 - PARIS 1989)

1906 :
On Good Friday, April 13, Samuel Barclay Beckett is born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock. The second son of a well-to-do protestant family, he has a happy childhood. Of his mother’s devout piety he would retain the spirit of metaphysical questioning but not its conventional religiosity. A brilliant student, he specialized in French and Italian and achieved distinction in various sports, especially cricket.
1926 : On his first trip to France during the summer he visits the chateaux of the Loire Valley.

1928 : He is appointed as Lecturer in English at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. During this two-year stint, he becomes a close friend of James Joyce, a writer whom he greatly admired and from whose literary influence he would free himself only with difficulty.
1931 : He gives up a prestigious and comfortable teaching career at Trinity College Dublin in order to devote himself entirely to his writing.
1937 : After many difficult years, marked by financial problems and depression, and after lengthy travels in Germany, which allow him to assess at first hand the Nazi menace, Beckett takes up residence in France.
1939 : At the outbreak of war, Beckett is visiting his family in Ireland. He returns immediately to Paris, preferring, as he would later say, to live in France in wartime than in Ireland in peacetime. Horrified by the Nazi’s treatment of the Jews, he joins the resistance.
1942 : The exposure of his resistance group by a priest that had infiltrated it requires that he leave Paris immediately with his companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. They arrive at the end of October in Roussillon, a village that they had discovered thanks to a friend of Suzanne. The war had interrupted delivery of the small allowance that Beckett began receiving after the death of this father, thus leaving the couple completely without resources. Beckett has no choice but to find employment as a farm worker. During the day, he works for Mr. Bonnelly, whom he cites in the French version of Godot, and for Mr. Aude, whose family he greatly enjoys. Evenings are devoted to writing, which he does “to keep his hand in it”. It is in Roussillon that he completes his second novel, Watt, the last to be written directly in English and the one in which he invents the figure of the tramp, which will return throughout his subsequent oeuvre.
1946 : After several months spent in Saint Lô (Manche) as an interpreter in a hospital, and a visit to Ireland during which he has the “revelation” that shows him the direction that his writing should take, he returns to Paris, where devotes himself to an intense period of writing (“the siege in the room”). In three years he produces his principal masterpieces, including the trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) and Waiting for Godot, completed in January 1949.
1953 : Rejected at first by several theaters, Godot has its premiere at the Théâtre de Babylone in a production directed by Roger Blin. Fifty years later, the fascination of this play has not diminished. Not a day goes by without its being performed somewhere in the world.
1969 : Recognized as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Beckett receives the Nobel Prize in Literature, a distinction that he accepts graciously but without particular pleasure, knowing as he does that it will infringe upon his privacy. He withdraws more and more frequently to his country home outside of the village of Ussy (Seine-and-Marne), where he writes texts of increasing brevity and works on English translations of others (a task that he regards as torture, but which he is determined to accomplish by himself). He also devotes himself to productions of his plays.
1989 : Beckett dies on December 22nd, a few months after his wife Suzanne. He is buried next to her in the Montparnasse Cemetery.