Samuel Beckett

13 April 1906 - 22 December 1989

Standard Name: Beckett, Samuel

SB , Irish expatriate poet, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright, was a major force in international twentieth-century writing and especially theatre. He wrote a high proportion of his works in French, usually doing the translations into English himself. His increasingly death-obsessed absurdity and minimalism are combined with an invincible energy of language, even while the text appears to despair of the efficacy of words.

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Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Literary responses	Harold Pinter	Peter Hall , its first director, likened the play to Mozart 's music for its precision, lyricism, and sudden descents into pain which are quickly over because of a healthy sense of the ridiculous. qtd. in Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. Samuel Beckett
Literary responses	Sarah Kane	Meanwhile fellow-playwright Mark Ravenhill , having initially concluded from the reviews that this was a bad play, was astonished at reading the first few lines and knowing that I was in the hands of a...
Literary responses	Anna Kavan	Jonathan Lethem revisited Ice in the New York Times fifty years after it appeared, in advance of its anniversary re-issue as a Penguin classic. His notice opened arrestingly: Anna Kavan's Ice is book like the...
Literary responses	Christine Brooke-Rose	It bore an endorsement of CBR 's work by Marina Warner , who considered that she brilliantly fuses political engagement, Beckett ian rhythms and experimental language as well as form. qtd. in “Some Other Recommended Titles”. London Review of Books, 23 Feb. 2006, p. 17. Reviewing the novel for the...
Occupation	Nancy Cunard	Her purpose in founding the press was to publish mainly contemporary poetry of an experimental kind. Virginia Woolf warned her that Your hands will always be covered with ink, Ford, Hugh, editor. Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel 1896-1965. Chilton Book Company, 1968. 69 but the Hours Press became...
Occupation	Harold Pinter	He acted for this company for a year and learned a lot. He worked his way up in Shakespearean roles from bit parts to major ones and discovered the writings of Samuel Beckett . Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Occupation	Harold Pinter	Always keen on acting, HP played the solo protagonist of Beckett 's Krapp's Last Tape in a wheelchair at the Royal Court Upstairs , in a run that began on 14 October 2006 (because an...
Author summary	Ann Quin	AQ was one of the less-known English experimental writers of the 1960s. She has been likened to Graham Greene , Nathalie Sarraute , Samuel Beckett , Robert Creeley , Virginia Woolf , and Anna Kavan
Publishing	Christine Brooke-Rose	CBR wrote criticism and reviews since 1947, often anonymously. Between 1956 and 1968 she freelanced at literary journalism and published on a wide range of topics in diverse journals. For the London Magazine, she...
Publishing	Julia Strachey	JS also wrote creatively for the New Statesman, and was commissioned to write critically on Samuel Beckett for The Spectator in 1957. Strachey, Julia, and Frances Partridge. Julia: A Portrait of Julia Strachey. Little, Brown, 1983. 189, 252
Publishing	Anne Carson	AC dealt another glancing blow to conventional notions of genre in 2001 by titling her next verse novel The Beauty of the Husband. A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos. Four poems from this work...
Reception	Sarah Kane	A propos the Sheffield production of 2015, Alan Bennett commented on the difficulty of achieving realism with such extreme violence: how can a character mutilated on stage be shown as having attention for anything at...
Residence	Edna O'Brien	Her cluttered writing room has an arbutus desk, books (many of them signed gifts from their authors), candles, paintings, the faded and fraying tapesty carpet, and images of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett presiding at...
Textual Features	Caroline Blackwood	Critic Val Warner called CB a unique voice in twentieth-century British fiction. Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981–2024, Numerous volumes. 65: 38 A press handout on Nancy Schoenberger 's biography likens Blackwood's work to that of Edna O'Brien , Muriel Spark , Iris Murdoch
Textual Production	Nancy Cunard	The book, published by NC 's Hours Press , included poems by Richard Aldington and Samuel Beckett and had a photomontage cover designed by Man Ray . Chisholm, Anne. Nancy Cunard. Knopf, 1979. 154

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