Samuel Beckett’s work has extended the possibilities of drama and fiction in unprecedented ways, bringing to the theatre and the novel an acute awareness of the absurdity of human existence – our desperate search for meaning, our individual isolation, and the gulf between our desires and the language in which they find expression. Educated in Ireland, North and South, he settled afterwards in Paris and produced his fiction and drama in English and French, translating himself out of the language in which he first wrote each text. Having begun literary life as a modernist and promoter of the reputations of Proust and Joyce, in the years before and after the Second World War he found his own voice (“began to write what I feel”) and continue

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First published 08 January 2001

Citation: Davies, Paul. "Samuel Beckett". The Literary Encyclopedia. 8 January 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5161, accessed 9 February 2010.]