Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright and author whose works have had a lasting influence and have helped redefine modernism. A protege of James Joyce, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
Career
Samuel Beckett became a teacher at Campbell College before taking a job as a lecturer in Paris. Here he met author James Joyce and worked with him for a while before publishing his own book in 1929. He returned to his own college and began teaching again. In 1931 he terminated his teaching career and began traveling. Beckett continued writing while he traveled and wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women in 1932. Finally settling down in Paris, he worked for the French Resistance as a courier. He continued to write all through the war and the many years that led up to his death. His final work was a poem he created in the nursing home, "What is the Word."
Notable Works
Quotes
- "All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead." - Samuel Beckett
- "Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss." - Samuel Beckett
- "No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found." - Samuel Beckett
