Samuel Beckett

Writer · Cast · Director

Born

April 13, 1906 · Foxrock, County Dublin, Ireland, UK [now Republic of Ireland]

Died

December 22, 1989

Birth name

Samuel Barclay Beckett

Samuel Beckett is an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his life, he wrote in both French and English. Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragi-comic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.