Irish · b. 1906
Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright and novelist whose minimalist, darkly comic work stripped language and dramatic form to their irreducible essentials.
Born in Foxrock, Dublin in 1906, Beckett moved to Paris in 1937 and spent most of his life there, writing with equal facility in French and English — and often translating himself between the two. The choice to write in a second language was deliberate: French, he said, made it easier to write without style, to strip away ornament and get to the bare thing. He died in Paris in 1989, having spent half a century dismantling everything that fiction and drama had assumed about themselves.
His major dramatic works — Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape — reimagined what a play could be: stripped of plot, populated by characters who cannot move or leave, filled with language that circles its own impossibility. Two men wait for someone who never comes; that is the entirety of Godot, and it contains more than most plots manage. His prose trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable) pushed the novel toward its logical limit, producing narrators who cannot be certain of anything, including their own existence. The Unnamable ends with “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” — six words that are somehow both defeat and defiance. The Nobel came in 1969; Beckett reportedly found the prize an unwelcome disturbance.
His influence on subsequent writers is enormous and often unacknowledged: Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Coetzee, David Foster Wallace all pass through him. The famous line from Worstward Ho — “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — has been claimed by motivational culture, which would have horrified him, but it does capture something real about what his work models: how to continue making art when all the justifications for making art have been exhausted.
by Samuel Beckett
Vladimir and Estragon wait by a tree for someone named Godot who never arrives. Two acts, almost no action, and one of the most performed and debated plays in the history of theatre.
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by Samuel Beckett
In a bare room, Hamm—blind and unable to stand—commands his servant Clov, while his legless parents Nagg and Nell sit in ashcans. Outside: nothing. Endgame is Beckett's most claustrophobic and arguably most profound play, a single act in which the end of the world seems to have already happened and all that remains is the habit of continuing.
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by Samuel Beckett
Malone lies in bed dying, telling himself stories to pass the time. He will be dead before the end of the book. The stories keep dissolving and beginning again; the characters merge; the pencil keeps getting lost. Middle volume of Beckett's great prose trilogy, and for many readers the most haunting.
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by Samuel Beckett
The final volume of Beckett's trilogy: a disembodied voice, without body or location, continues to speak. It cannot stop speaking and cannot speak truly. It does not know who or what it is. The Unnamable ends with 'I can't go on, I'll go on'—the most famous sentence in modernist fiction—and continues after that.
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by Samuel Beckett
A crippled man named Molloy makes his way toward his mother's house, then a detective named Moran is sent to find him — two impossible journeys narrated in prose that questions at every step whether anything it says is true.
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by Samuel Beckett
Watt arrives at the house of Mr. Knott to serve as his domestic. He observes everything with extreme precision and cannot understand any of it. When his service ends, he moves to an asylum and dictates the story to a man named Sam. Beckett's most comic novel—and the one in which he worked out the machinery he would use for the rest of his career.
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Samuel Beckett's complete bibliography in order — from Waiting for Godot and Molloy to The Unnamable and Malone Dies. Best starting points for new readers.
guide
Where to start with Samuel Beckett — whether to begin with Molloy, Malone Dies, or Waiting for Godot. A complete reading guide to his fiction and drama.
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