Hello !

Last week we read an extract of a Samuel Beckett’s play, untitled Waiting for Godot.
It’s an absurdist play.

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. Today, he is considered one of the last modernists, and he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He wrote in English and French.

In 1956, the BBC asked him to broadcast a radio play: it will be All That Fall (« Tous ceux qui tombent »). He continues to write occasionally for radio, but also for an experimental silent film, Film in 1965 (with Buster Keaton) and television. He started writing in English, without abandoning the French.

During the World War II, he participated to the Resistance.
After the war, he published Molloy (1951); Malone Dies (1958); and The Unnamable, (1960).

It is in French that Beckett wrote his most famous works. In fifteen years, three plays are a great success: Waiting for Godot (1948-1949), Endgame (1955-1957) and Happy Days (1960). The extract of Waiting for Godot in your book is p.125 !

Then he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, but he sees that as a « disaster » ; His confusion to receive the Nobel Prize is explained by his dislike of socializing and duties.

He dies in 1989 and is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery.

(Beckett in 1977; (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Samuel_Beckett,_Pic,_1.jpg)