Samuel Beckett

"Penguin Illustrated Lives" is a series of photographic biographies that offers a fresh, intimate portrait of some of our favourite writers. An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera. Samuel Beckett was perhaps the most unconventional playwright of the 20th century. His plays broke all the rules by dispensing with traditional concepts of plot, scene and character, concentrating instead on the experience of the drama itself. An intensely private man, Beckett's work was profoundly influenced by his relationship with his mother and what he called her "savage loving", and by the tensions and hypocrisies of his divided country. In his work, he presents us with our own humanity; the hopelessness and the solitude, the bizarre tragicomedy of life itself.