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Beckett 1906 - 1989 (83)

All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.


QUOTES

Wiating

for Godott

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all. It is true the population has increased.

Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906 - December 22, 1989) was an Irish writer, poet and playwright identified with the theater of absurdity. He was born in Dublin in a bourgeois Protestant family and he studied at the Trinity College, French, Italian and English Literature. In mid-1920s he went to Paris, and begun writing for newspapers and magazines. When he returned to Ireland, he taught for a while at the College and then began to travel and write. For a while he made psychoanalysis in London and then lived in Germany learning the language. In the mid-30s he met his life partner Susan, with whom he married much later (in 1961) for legal reasons.

During the Second World War he participated with his wife in the Resistance, and when they were in danger of being arrested they fled to Spain. They returned to Dublin after the war, where they were found in a precarious financial situation. For a while his wife earned their living by sewing clothes and giving piano lessons while he was writing. After 1947 he wrote his most important works, most of them in French. In 1952, his play "Waiting for Goddot" was presented and had very controversial reviews; it was worshiped by the half and condemned from the rest. Though for Beckett, it began a very successful career in the theater, both as a writer and as a director. Among his best-known plays are "The End of the Game" and "Happy Days", while the novels "Molly" and "Malone Dies" and “The Unnamable” have also been very successful. Beckett gained worldwide reputation and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. His wife died on July 17, 1989, and he followed her 5 months later.