Life and Works of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett, well-known poet, playwright and novelist on the absurd, was born on Good Friday of 1906 in Foxrock, Dublin in Ireland. He belonged to a middle class Protestant family and sent to the famed Port Royal School in Enniskillen (today Northern Ireland) and to Trinity College in Dublin. (MSN Learning and Research 2003).
He excelled in sports and showed no indications of the bottomless gloom that would characterize his later life and literary works. At the age of 17, he met and got close to Dante, a lifetime literary friend, who figured in Beckett's early works. He was an excellent student of French and Italian at Trinity College, where he also won a prestigious scholarship at ...
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over Joyce's mentally unstable daughter who had a liking for Beckett. He studied the works of French philosopher Rene Descartes and wrote about French novelist Marcel Proust in 1931.
He then returned to Dublin and there worked as a high school teacher at the Trinity College, but resigned the following year. He wandered aimlessly for many years, in poor health and with only a small annuity he received upon his father's death. In these arid times, he read vigorously, visited art galleries, drank a lot, was subjected to two years of intensive psychological treatment in London in 1934 to 1936 and saw prostitutes occasionally (Goodwin). Spending a year in Germany he witnessed the rise of the dictator Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
He was first published when he was 28 years old but yielded little financial benefits. He wrote a Joycean autobiographical novel, entitled "Dream of Fair to Middling Women", which found no publisher and embarrassed Beckett so much as to keeping it unpublished for ...
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was while visiting his mother that Becket encountered brokenness outside and inside of him, broken people around him, poverty, ignorance, and wasting away. He then tried writing plays, beginning with "Eleutheria," which was first a failure. But he continued to do more. His best-known were written in the 50s, prominently "Waiting for Godot", the novel trilogy "Molloy, Malone Dies" and "The Unnamable." "Waiting for Godot" found a publisher only after two years. The production was unstable at the start until it attracted crowds in Paris and throughout the world. Beckett's success was, however, badly dented by his mother's death in 1950 as well as that of his brother in 1954. But ...
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Life and Works of Samuel Beckett. (2015, December 9). Retrieved April 20, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Life-and-Works-of-Samuel-Beckett/105259
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"Life and Works of Samuel Beckett." Essayworld.com. December 9, 2015. Accessed April 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Life-and-Works-of-Samuel-Beckett/105259.
"Life and Works of Samuel Beckett." Essayworld.com. December 9, 2015. Accessed April 20, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Life-and-Works-of-Samuel-Beckett/105259.
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