Beckett, Samuel 1906–1989
Beckett, Samuel 1906–1989
(Samuel Barclay Beckett)
PERSONAL: Born April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, Dublin Ireland; died of respiratory failure December 22, 1989, in Paris, France; son of William Frank (a quantity surveyor) and Mary Jones (an interpreter for the Irish Red Cross; maiden name, Roe) Beckett; married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil (a pianist), March 25, 1961. Education: Attended Portora Royal School, County Fermanagh, Ireland; Trinity College, Dublin, B.A. (French and Italian), 1927, M.A., 1931.
CAREER: Writer. École Normale Superieure, Paris, France, lecturer in English, 1928–30; Trinity College, Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, lecturer in French, 1930–32; assistant to author James Joyce, c. early 1930s; worked as a farmhand near Roussillon, France, during World War II. Military service: Involved in French resistance, 1940–43; storekeeper and interpreter for Irish Red Cross Hospital, St. Lo, France, 1945–46; decorated.
AWARDS, HONORS: Hours Press (Paris) award for best poem concerning time, 1930, for Whoroscope: Poem on Time; London Evening Standard Award for Most Controversial Play, 1955, for Waiting for Godot; Italia Prize, 1957, for All That Fall, and 1959, for Embers; Village Voice Off-Broadway awards for best new play, 1958, for Endgame, and 1964, for Play, for distinguished play, 1960, for Krapp's Last Tape, and for best foreign play, 1962, for Happy Days; Litt.D., Trinity College, Dublin, 1959; International Publishers prize, 1961 (shared with Jorge Luis Borges), for body of work; Prix Filmcritice, 1965, and Tours film prize, 1966, both for Film; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1969; Grand Prix National du Theatre (France), 1975.
WRITINGS:
NOVELS
Murphy, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1938, Grove (New York, NY), 1957, French translation by Beckett, Bordas (Paris, France), 1947, reissued as Demented Particulars: The Annotated Murphy, edited by C.J. Ackerley, preface by S.E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett Studies Books (Tallahassee, FL), 1998.
Molloy (fragment of early version; originally published in transition, 1950, together with fragment of Malone Dies under collective title, "Two Fragments"; also see below), Minuit (Paris, France), 1951, English translation by Beckett and Patrick Bowles, Grove (New York, NY), 1955.
Malone meurt, Minuit (Paris, France), 1951, English translation by Beckett published as Malone Dies, Grove (New York, NY), 1956.
Watt, Olympia Press (Paris, France), 1953, Grove (New York, NY), 1959, revised and translated into French by the author, Minuit (Paris, France), 1968.
L'Innommable, Minuit (Paris, France), 1953, English translation by Beckett published as The Unnamable, Grove (New York, NY), 1958.
Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, [and] The Unnamable, Grove (New York, NY), 1959, with an introduction by Gabriel Josipovici, Knopf (New York, NY), 1997.
Comment c'est, Minuit (Paris, France), 1961, English translation by Beckett published as How It Is, Grove (New York, NY), 1964.
Imagination morte imaginez, Minuit (Paris, France), 1965, English translation by Beckett published as Imagination Dead Imagine, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1965.
Mercier et Camier, Minuit (Paris, France), 1970, translation by Beckett published as Mercier and Camier, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1974, Grove (New York, NY), 1975.
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, edited by Eoin O'Brien and Edith Fournier, Arcade Publishing (New York, NY), 1993.
Nohow On: Three Novels, edited by S.E. Gontarski, Grove (New York, NY), 1996.
SHORT FICTION
More Pricks than Kicks, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1934, reprinted, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1966.
Nouvelles et textes pour rien (fiction; contains "L'Expulse," "Le Calmant," and "La Fin"), Minuit (Paris, France), 1955, translation by Beckett and others published as No's Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1947–1965 (also see below), Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1967, published as Stories and Texts for Nothing, Grove (New York, NY), 1967.
Assez, Minuit (Paris, France), 1966.
Ping, Minuit (Paris, France), 1966.
Tete-mortes (includes Imagination morte imaginez, Ping, and Assez), Minuit (Paris, France), 1967.
L'Issue, Georges Visat, 1968.
Sans, Minuit (Paris, France), 1969, translation by Beckett published as Lessness, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1971.
Sejour, Georges Richar, 1970.
Premier amour, Minuit (Paris, France), 1970, translation by Beckett published as First Love, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1973.
The North, Enitharmon Press, 1972.
First Love and Other Shorts, Grove (New York, NY), 1974.
Fizzles, Grove (New York, NY), 1976.
For to End Yet Again and Other Fizzles, Calder & Bo-yars (London, England), 1976.
All Strange Away, Gotham Book Mart (New York, NY), 1976.
Four Novellas, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1977, published as The Expelled and Other Novellas, Penguin (Harmonsdworth, England), 1980.
Six Residua, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1978.
Mal vu mal dit, Minuit (Paris, France), 1981, translation by Beckett published as Ill Seen Ill Said, Grove (New York, NY), 1982.
Worstward Ho, Grove (New York, NY), 1983.
As the Story Was Told, Riverrun Press (New York, NY), 1990.
Stirrings Still, Blue Moon Books, 1991.
Nohow On (novella), Riverrun Press (New York, NY), 1993.
Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–1988, Riverrun Press (New York, NY), 1995.
Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, edited and with introduction by S.E. Gontarski, Grove (New York, NY), 1995.
Also author of short story "Premier amour."
PLAYS
Le Kid, produced in Dublin, Ireland, 1931.
En Attendant Godot (first produced in Paris, France, 1953), Minuit (Paris, France), 1952, English translation by Beckett published as Waiting for Godot (first produced in London, England, 1955; produced in Miami Beach, 1956; produced on Broadway, 1956), Grove (New York, NY), 1954, revised edition, 1994.
All That Fall (radio play; produced on BBC Third Programme, 1957), Grove (New York, NY), 1957, revised, 1968–69.
Fin de partie (one-act; first produced with Acte sans paroles in London, England, 1957), French European Publications, 1957, English translation by Beckett produced as Endgame in New York, NY, 1958.
Acte sans paroles (mime for one player; first produced with Fin de partie in London, England, 1957), music by John Beckett, English translation by Beckett produced as Act without Words in New York, NY, 1959.
From an Abandoned Work (produced on BBC Third Programme, 1957), published in Evergreen Review, Volume 1, number 3, 1957, Faber & Faber, 1958.
Krapp's Last Tape, first produced in London, England 1958, produced in Provincetown, RI, 1960.
Embers, first produced on BBC Third Programme, 1959.
Acte sans paroles II, produced in London, England, 1960, English translation produced as Act without Words II.
Happy Days (first produced in New York, NY, 1961), Grove (New York, NY), 1961, French translation by Beckett as Oh les beaux jours (produced in Paris, France, 1963), Minuit (Paris, France), 1963, 2nd edition, French European Publications, 1975.
Play, produce in London, England, 1964.
Eh, Joe? and Other Writings (television play; produced by New York Television Theatre, 1966; also see below), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1967.
Va et vient (produced in Berlin, Germany, 1966), published in Comedie et actes divers, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1967, English version produced as Come and Go, Dublin, Ireland, 1968.
Breath, produced in Oxford, England, 1970.
Le depeupleur, French European Publications, 1970, translation by Beckett published as The Lost Ones (produced in New York, NY, 1975), Grove (New York, NY), 1972.
Not I (produced in New York, NY, 1972), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1971.
That Time (produced in London, England, 1976), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1976.
Footfalls (produced in London, England, 1976), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1976.
A Piece of Monologue, produced in New York, NY, 1979.
Company (monologue), Grove (New York, NY), 1980.
Rockabye, produced in Buffalo, NY, 1981.
Texts for Nothing, produced in New York, NY, 1981.
Ohio Impromptu, produced in Columbus, OH, 1981.
Eleutheria (new edition), Minuit (Paris, France), 1995, published in English as Eleutheria: A Play in Three Acts, Foxrock (New York, NY), 1995.
The Shorter Plays (includes revised texts for Footfalls, Come and Go, and What Where), edited and introduction by S.E. Gontarski, Grove (New York, NY), 1999.
OMNIBUS EDITIONS OF PLAYS
Fin de partie [and] Acte sans paroles, Minuit (Paris, France), 1957, English translation by Beckett published as Endgame [and] Act without Words, Grove (New York, NY), 1958.
Krapp's Last Tape [and] Embers, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1959, published as Krapp's Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces (also contains All that Fall, Act without Words, and Act without Words II ), Grove (New York, NY), 1960.
Play and Two Short Pieces for Radio (contains Play, Words and Music [first published in Evergreen Review, November-December, 1962], and Cascando [first published in Dublin Magazine, October-December, 1936; also see below]), Faber & Faber (London, England), 1964.
Comedie et actes divers (contains Comedie, Va et vient, Cascando, Paroles et musiques [French translation by Beckett of Words and Music], Dis Joe [French translation by Beckett of Eh, Joe?; also see below], and Acte sans paroles II), Minuit (Paris, France), 1966.
Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces, Grove (New York, NY), 1968.
Breath and Other Shorts, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1971.
Ends and Odds: Eight New Dramatic Pieces, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1977.
Rockabye and Other Short Pieces, Grove (New York, NY), 1981.
Catastrophe et autres dramaticules: cette fois, solo, berceuse, impromptu d'Ohio, Minuit (Paris, France), 1982.
Three Occasional Pieces, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1982.
Collected Shorter Plays, Grove (New York, NY), 1984.
Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe, and What Where, Grove (New York, NY), 1984.
The Complete Dramatic Works, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1986.
Samuel Beckett's Company-Compagnie and a Piece of Monologue—Solo: A Bilingual Variorum Edition, Garland (New York, NY), 1993.
Dramaticulesg, Riverrun Press (New York, NY), 1995.
OTHER
Whoroscope: Poem on Time, Hours Press (Paris), 1930.
Proust (criticism), Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1931, Grove (New York, NY), 1957.
Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (poems), Europa Press (Paris, France), 1935.
A Samuel Beckett Reader, edited by John Calder, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1967.
(With Georges Duthuit and Jacques Putnam) Bram van Velde (criticism), Falaise (Paris, France), 1958, English translation by Olive Chase and Beckett, Grove (New York, NY), 1960.
Henri Hayden, Waddington Galleries, 1959.
Poems in English, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1961, Grove (New York, NY), 1962.
(With Georges Duthuit) Proust and Three Dialogues (criticism), Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1965.
Poemes, Minuit (Paris, France), 1968.
Abandonne, Georges Visat, 1972.
Au loin un oiseau, Double Elephant Press, 1973.
An Examination of James Joyce, M.S.G. House, 1974.
Pour finir encore, French and European Publications, 1976.
I Can't Go On: A Selection from the Works of Samuel Beckett, edited by Richard Seaver, Grove (New York, NY), 1976.
Collected Poems in English and French, Grove (New York, NY), 1977, revised as Collected Poems, 1930–1978, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1984.
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1983, Grove (New York, NY), 1984.
Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–1980, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1984.
Happy Days: The Production Notebook, edited by James Knowlson, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1985, Grove (New York, NY), 1986.
(Translator with Edouard Roditi and Denise Levertov) Alain Bosquet, No Matter No Fact, New Directions (New York, NY), 1988.
Collected Poems in English, Grove (New York, NY), 1989.
Endgame: Production Notebook, revised edition, Grove (New York, NY), 1993.
Collected Poems, 1930–1989, Riverrun Press (New York, NY), 1995.
No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, edited by Maurice Harmon, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1998.
Beckett Short (short writings and excerpts), Calder (New York, NY), 1999.
(Translator) Beckett in Black and Red: The Translations for Nancy Cunard's Negro (1934), edited by Alan Warren Friedman, University Press of Kentucky (Lexington, KY), 2000.
Contributor to books, including Our Examination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Shakespeare Co. (Paris, France), 1929, New Directions (New York, NY), 1939, 2nd edition, 1962; contributor to periodicals, including transition, New Review, Evergreen Review, Contempo, Les Temps Modernes, Merlin, and Spectrum.
ADAPTATIONS: Film, a mime adaptation by Mariu Karmitz, of Play), was produced by M.K. Productions and starred Buster Keaton, M.K. Productions, 1966. Many of Beckett's works have been adapted for radio and television broadcast. Film versions of nineteen of Beckett's plays were presented at the "Beckett of Film" festival in Dublin, Ireland, February 1-8, 2001, and are available in DVD format from Ambrose Video. His works have also been produced on CD and audiotape.
SIDELIGHTS: Most discussions of Samuel Beckett's work take a tone seldom applied to others writers. As a Time reviewer noted: "Some chronicle men on their way up; others tackle men on their way down. Samuel Beckett stalks after men on their way out." Most literary critics agree that there is difficulty in communicating the unique power of Beckett's writing. Along with the work of Eugene Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter, Beckett's stark plays are said to compose the "Theatre of the Absurd." But to so label Beckett's work is to disqualify one of his own first premises: that, since no human activity has any intrinsic meaning, it is pointless to ascribe traditional or categorical significance to the existence of an object or the performance of a deed. Perhaps Beckett himself stated his dilemma most succinctly in L'Innommable: "Dans ma vie, puisqu'il faut l'appeler ainsi, il y eut trois choses, l'impossibilite de parler, l'impossibilite de me taire, et la solitude." ("One must speak; man cannot possibly communicate with his fellows, but the alternative—silence—is irreconcilable with human existence.") According to the Time contributor, "Beckett's champions argue that his threnodies in dusky twilight represent the existential metaphor of the human condition, that the thin but unwavering voices of his forlorn characters speak the ultimate statement of affirmation, if only because the merest attempt at communication is itself affirmation."
But in case the reader of Beckett criticism should come to regard this question as the black and white one of "despair" versus "optimism," Richard N. Coe added new terms to the argument in his Beckett: "To class Beckett himself as the simple incarnation of 'despair' is a drastic oversimplification. To begin with, the concept of 'despair' implies the existence of a related concept 'hope,' and 'hope' implies a certain predictable continuity in time—which continuity Beckett would seriously question. 'Despair,' with all its inherent moral overtones, is a term which is wholly inadequate to describe Beckett's attitude towards the human condition; nor is this condition, in the most current sense of the definition, 'absurd.' It is literally and logically impossible. And in this central concept of 'impossibility,' his thought has most of its origins—as does also his art."
For some critics, like John Gassner in his Theatre at the Crossroads, the scholarly complexity of the critical response to Beckett's work has been overwrought. Gassner wrote: "To a parvenu intelligentsia, it would seem that a work of art exists not for its own sake but only for the possibilities of interpreting it." Nevertheless, some critics believe that Beckett's theater is most meaningful when considered within the context of a recognizable literary tradition. Kenneth Allsop noted in his The Angry Decade that Beckett's "harsh, desolate, denuded style is entirely and unmistakably his own, but his literary 'form' … derives from his years [working with] … James Joyce. That is only a partial explanation. He is in a monolithic way the last of the Left Bank Mohicans of the Twenties; the others of the avant-garde died or deserted or prospered, but Beckett was a loyal expatriate." In the New York Times Book Review J.D. O'Hara saw Beckett's work as exponential to the philosophy of Descartes: "In Beckett's world of post-Cartesian dualism, the mind has no connection to the body, its values worth nothing there, and so it cannot logically concern itself with the body's problems." John Fletcher concluded in Samuel Beckett's Art that "whatever the truth of the matter, one thing is certain. Beckett has ranged freely among the writings of the philosophers, where he has found confirmation and justification of the metaphysical obsessions that haunt his work: the gulf set between body and mind, the epistemological incertitude. His genius has achieved the transmutation of such speculative problems into art." But, according to Coe, one must keep in mind that "Beckett has renounced his claim to erudition. The main theme of his work is impotence, of mind just as much as of body."
Most critics agree that the 1954 English-language publication of Waiting for Godot established Beckett's prominence in the United States; in Contemporary Theatre, H.A. Smith dubbed the work "the most comprehensively and profoundly evocative play" of the mid-twentieth century. As Allsop maintained, "Godot is a hymn to extol the moment when the mind swings off its hinges…. Beckett is unconcerned with writing requiems for humanity, for he sees life as polluted and pointless: he merely scrawls its obituary, without bitterness or compassion because he cannot really believe it is worth the words he is wasting." Gassner also found the play to be a straightforward pronouncement, but he did not accept it as a prediction of certain doom. "To all this tohu and bohu about the profundity and difficulty of the play," he wrote, "my reply is simply that there is nothing painfully or exhilaratingly ambiguous about Waiting for Godot in the first place. It presents the view that man, the hapless wanderer in the universe, brings his quite wonderful humanity—his human capacity for hope, patience, resilience, and, yes, for love of one's kind, too, as well as his animal nature—to the weird journey of existence. He is lost in the universe and found in his own heart and in the hearts of his fellow men."
Kenneth Tynan wrote in his Curtains that the implications of Waiting for Godot are significant within the spectrum of mid-twentieth-century theater. He wrote: "A special virtue attaches to plays which remind the drama of how much it can do without and still exist. By all known criteria, Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum. Pity the critic who seeks a chink in its armour, for it is all chink. It has no plot, no climax, no denouement; no beginning, no middle, and no end. Unavoidably, it has a situation, and it might be accused of having suspense…. Waiting for Godot frankly jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books. A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored…. It forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough."
Some critics found 1957's Endgame to be an even more powerful expression of Beckett's negativism. Gassner wrote: "Nothing happens in Endgame and that nothing is what matters. The author's feeling about nothing also matters, not because it is true or right but because it is a strongly formed attitude, a felt and expressed viewpoint…. The yardsticks of dialectical materialism and moralism are equally out in appraising the play. Dialectical materialism could only say that Endgame is decadent. Moralism and theology would say that the play is sinful, since nothing damns the soul so much as despair of salvation. Neither yardstick could tell us that this hauntingly powerful work of the imagination is art."
Although critics discuss his plays more frequently than his novels, Beckett himself was said to have considered his novels to be his major works. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer, in his discussion of Imagination Dead Imagine, summarized Beckett's work thus: "[This novel] certainly describes two people in an imaginary situation and it is equally certainly a work of large implications and a desolate, cruel beauty. It might not seem so, however, if it had not been apparent for some time that Mr. Beckett's prose narratives compose a single, long saga of exclusion and heroic relinquishment as well as of the desperate, perhaps unavailing, pursuit of finality." In his Puzzles and Epiphanies Frank Kermode offered this analysis of the novels: "In Beckett's plays the theatrical demand for communicable rhythms and relatively crude satisfactions has had a beneficent effect. But in the novels he yields progressively to the magnetic pull of the primitive, to the desire to achieve, by various forms of decadence and deformation, some Work that eludes the intellect, avoids the spread nets of habitual meaning. Beckett is often allegorical, but he is allegorical in fitful patches, providing illusive toeholds to any reader scrambling for sense."
The fact that most of Beckett's important work was originally written in French is far more than coincidentally significant to his stylistic achievement. Coe explained: "Beckett, in the final analysis, is trying to say what cannot be said; he must be constantly on his guard, therefore, never to yield to the temptation of saying what the words would make him say. Only when language is, as it were, defeated, bound hand and foot; only when it is so rigorously disciplined that each word describes exactly and quasiscientifically the precise concept to which it is related and no other, only then, by the progressive elimination of that which precisely is, is there a remote chance for the human mind to divine the ultimate reality which is not. And this relentless, almost masochistic discipline, which reaches its culmination in Comment c'est, Beckett achieves by writing in a language which is not his own—in French."
Although unpublished for sixty years, Beckett's first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, was published in the United States in 1993. The author composed the book as a young man of twenty-six during a summer spent in Paris. The protagonist of Dream is the adventurous Belacqua, and the story centers on his varied experiences in Dublin and Paris. Beckett's style here, according to Colm Toibin in the London Review of Books, "is a rambling stream of consciousness, full of asides and associations, with a tone of half-seriousness and oblique mockery…. The writing is self-conscious: it reads as though the writer wrote it merely to read it himself." Beckett himself described Dream as "the chest into which I threw my wild thoughts." And, as O'Hara commented in the New York Times Book Review, "he reused them, often word for word." In the end, George Craig asserted in the Times Literary Supplement, while Dream of Fair to Middling Women "is Beckett's earliest venture, and it shows … something important is going on: the search for [his] voice."
Similarly, Beckett's first play, Eleutheria—the title means "freedom" in Greek—collected dust in the author's trunk for nearly fifty years before being published in 1995. The dark, three-act comedy concerns a privacy-obsessed writer who tries in vain to escape from his family and friends, spending most of the play fighting off their efforts to mend what is left of his life. Eleutheria was written just prior to Waiting for Godot, but it demands more complex staging; seventeen characters and two sets are shown simultaneously in the first two acts before one disappears into the orchestra pit in the final act. Because of its stage requirement, it was not produced in the 1950s when Godot burst onto the contemporary theatrical scene.
Because it was well known that Beckett did not want Eleutheria published, its appearance prompted considerable controversy, with some people appalled that the author's final request for its suppression—from his deathbed, no less—was ignored. Jonathan Kalb noted in American Theatre that the play is neither "a hidden masterpiece" nor "a catastrophe," but rather "a fascinating, rare instance of Beckettian excess…. At times windy, redundant, even confusing, it will certainly take its proper place as a minor, formative work that is buoyed by eloquent and hilarious passages and the tantalizing seeds of great themes, devices, and characters to come." As Mel Gussow put it in the New York Times Book Review, "Waiting for Godot is revolutionary; Eleutheria is evolutionary."
Beckett's works continue to be dissected by critics and his plays, especially "Waiting for Godot," are performed around the world; in 2003, for example, Happy Days, was performed in London's West End and Endgame was staged in Korea. Nearly all of Godot's plays have also been adapted for film, the most ambitious endeavor in this area being the "Beckett on Film" project, which filmed nineteen plays. "One of the things with all the Beckett plays, per the Beckett estate, is that you have to stick to the text," Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who directed the film version of "Waiting for Godot," told Charles Lyons in Variety.
In 2003 the city of Dublin, Ireland, where Beckett was born, held a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Whether or not Beckett would have appreciated the celebration, few would argue that the author's work will continue to impact the literary consciousness for years to come. As Kalb noted, "Thirteen years after his death and 50 years after the premiere of Waiting for Godot,—a play that made boredom (of a sort) respectable in the theatre—Samuel Beckett is still something of an incalculable quantity."
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:
BOOKS
Abbott, H. Porter, Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1996.
Acheson, James, Samuel Beckett's Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama, and Early Fiction, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.
Allsop, Kenneth, The Angry Decade, Copp, 1958.
Armstrong, William A., and others, editors, Experimental Drama, G. Bell, 1963.
Baker, Phil, Beckett and the Mythology of Psychoanalysis, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1997.
Beckett, Samuel, L'Innommable, Minuit (Paris, France), 1953.
Brater, Enoch, The Drama in the Text: Beckett's Late Fiction, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1994.
Brown, John Russell, and Bernard Harris, Contemporary Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 4, Edward Arnold, 1962.
Bryden, Mary, editor, Samuel Beckett and Music, Clarendon Press (Oxford, England), 1998.
Bryden, Mary, Samuel Beckett and the Idea of God, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1998.
Butler, Lance St. John, Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, Ashgate Publishing Co. (Brookfield, VT), 1994.
Coe, Richard N., Beckett, Oliver & Boyd, 1964.
Cohn, Ruby, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut, Rutgers University Press (Rutgers, NJ), 1962.
Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 6, 1976, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 29, 1984, Volume 57, 1990, Volume 59, 1990, Volume 83, 1994.
Cronin, Anthony, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.
Danziger, Marie A., Text/Countertext: Fear, Guilt, and Retaliation in the Postmodern Novel, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1996.
Davies, Paul, The Ideal Real: Beckett's Fiction and Imagination, Associated University Presses (Cranbury, NJ), 1994.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 13: British Dramatists since World War II, 1982, Volume 15: British Novelists, 1930–1959, 1983.
Dillon, Brian, Beckett's Blurry Signature, Department of Liberal Arts, Nova University (Ft. Lauderdale, FL), 1995.
Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Doubleday-Anchor (New York, NY), 1961.
Fletcher, John, Samuel Beckett's Art, Barnes & Noble (New York, NY), 1967.
Gassner, John, Theatre at the Crossroads, Holt (New York, NY), 1960.
Gordon, Lois G., The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906–1946, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1996.
Guicharnaud, Jacques, and June Beckelman, Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Beckett, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1961.
Harding, James M., Adorno and "A Writing of the Ruins": Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 1997.
Hoffman, Frederick J., Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self, Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.
Kenner, Hugh, Samuel Beckett, J. Calder, 1962.
Kenner, Hugh, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1996.
Kermode, Frank, Puzzles and Epiphanies, Chilmark, 1962.
Kim, Hwa Soon, The Counterpoint of Hope, Obsession, and Desire for Death in Five Plays by Samuel Beckett, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1996.
Knowlson, James, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 1996.
Kostelanetz, Richard, editor, On Contemporary Literature, Avon (New York, NY), 1954.
Lumley, Frederick, New Trends in Twentieth-Century Drama, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1967.
Minihan, John, and Aidan Higgins, Samuel Beckett: Photographs, George Braziller (New York, NY), 1996.
Murphy, P. J., Critique of Beckett Criticism: A Guide to Research in English, French, and German, Camden House (Columbia, SC), 1994.
O'Hara, J. D., Samuel Beckett's Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology, University Press of Florida, 1997.
Oppenheim, Lois, Directing Beckett, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1994.
Oppenheim, Lois, Marius Buning and The International Beckett Symposium, Beckett On and On, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (Madison, NJ), 1996.
Piette, Adam, Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmae, Proust, Joyce, Beckett, Clarendon Press (New York, NY), 1996.
Pilling, John, The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.
Pilling, John, Beckett before Godot, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1997.
Pultar, Geoneul, Technique and Tradition in Beckett's Trilogy of Novels, University Press of America (Lanham, MD), 1996.
Simpson, Alan, Beckett and Behan and a Theatre in Dublin, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1962.
Tindall, William York, Samuel Beckett, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1964.
Tynan, Kenneth, Curtains, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1961.
Wellwarth, George, Theatre of Protest and Paradox, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1964.
Wolosky, Shira, Language Mysticism: The Negative Way of Language in Eliot, Beckett, and Celan, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1995.
PERIODICALS
American Scholar, winter, 1992, p. 124.
American Theatre, January, 2003, Jonathan Kalb, "Stardust Melancholy: Does the Filming of Samuel Beckett's Complete Works Compromise His Theatrical Legacy?," p. 42.
Atlantic, August, 1967.
Carleton Miscellany, winter, 1967.
Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 1967.
Comparative Literature, winter, 1965.
Connoisseur, July, 1990, p. 56.
Critique, spring, 1963; winter, 1964–65.
Economist, January 6, 1990, p. 90.
English Review, February 2001, Paul Williams, "Samuel Beckett's Engame," p. 17.
Esquire, September, 1967; May, 1990, p. 87.
Explicator, spring, 2002, p. 159.
Hudson Review, spring, 1967.
Journal of European Studies, December, 2002, p. 351.
Kenyon Review, March, 1967.
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 1993, p. 162.
Life, February 2, 1968.
Listener, August 3, 1967.
Livres de France, January, 1967.
London Magazine, August, 1967.
London Review of Books, November 9, 1989, p. 26; April 8, 1993, p. 14.
Manchester Guardian, April 21, 1966.
Nation, October 3, 1987, p. 349; December 19, 1988, p. 26; April 30, 1990, p. 611; May 6, 1996, p. 16.
New Republic, December 12, 1988, p. 26; October 22, 1990, p. 30.
New Statesman, February 14, 1964; March 25, 1966; July 14, 1967.
New Statesman & Society, July 6, 1990, p. 46; October 11, 1991, p. 22; January 8, 1993, p. 42.
New York, September 28, 1987, p. 133; July 11, 1988, p. 46.
New York Review of Books, March 19, 1964; December 7, 1967; December 8, 1988, p. 30; August 13, 1992, p. 17; December 16, 1993, p. 42.
New York Times, July 21, 1964; February 27, 1966; April 19, 1966; July 20, 1967; September 14, 1967.
New York Times Book Review, June 12, 1988, p. 18; June 13, 1993, p. 11; April 17, 1994, p. 24; June 25, 1995, p. 9; May 26, 1996, p. 4.
Observer (London, England), July 16, 1967; July 15, 1990, p. 53; July 22, 1990, p. 52; November 1, 1992, p. 62.
Partisan Review, spring, 1966.
Publishers Weekly, September 26, 1994, p. 12.
Punch, August 2, 1967.
Saturday Review, October 4, 1958.
Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, summer, 2003, p. 219; winter, 2003, p. 6.
Time, July 14, 1967; November 21, 1988, p. 58.
Times Literary Supplement, December 21, 1962; January 30, 1964; June 30, 1966; July 20, 1990, p. 782; November 27, 1992, p. 25.
Tri-Quarterly, winter, 1967.
Tulane Drama Review, summer, 1967.
Variety, November 6, 2000, Charles Lyons, "Helmer Weights 'Godot,'" p. 71.
Village Voice, April 6, 1967; July 13, 1967; June 20, 1995, p. 69.
Washington Post Book World, May 23, 1993, p. 8.
World Literature Today, winter, 1994, p. 125; autumn, 1995, p. 761.
OBITUARIES:
PERIODICALS
Chicago Tribune, December 27, 1989.
Los Angeles Times, December 27, 1989.
Maclean's, January 8, 1990, p. 47.
Newsweek, January 8, 1990, p. 43.
New York Times, December 27, 1989.
People, January 8, 1990, p. 46.
Time, January 8, 1990, p. 69.