The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwright, theatre director, novelist and poet. Born in Dublin in 1906, he studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College. He moved to Paris in 1928 - where he would spend much of his life, writing mostly in French - to teach English, and worked as a courier for the French resistance during World War II. His most famous play, Waiting for Godot, was first performed in 1953. He then wrote Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958) and Happy Days (1961). A modernist, associated with the 'Theatre of the Absurd', his work eschews conventional plotting or structure, exploring the human condition as bleakly humorous and profound, using laughter as a weapon against despair. Over his career, his work became increasingly experimental and minimalist, stripped down to the most essential elements: Play (1962) places its characters in funeral urns with only their heads visible, and Not I (1972) consists of a mouth speaking in the darkness. In the 1940s and 50s Beckett also published a number of acclaimed novels. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. Beckett died in 1989 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.