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Samuel Beckett

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre; Writers and
critics

   CAPTION: Samuel Beckett

    Pseudonym(s):    Andrew Belis (Recent Irish Poetry)
        Born:        13 April 1906
                     Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland
        Died:        22 December 1989
                     Paris, France
    Occupation(s):   novelist, short story writer, playwright, poet, essayist
     Nationality:    Irish
      Genre(s):      Drama, fictional prose
  Literary movement: Modernism, Theatre of the Absurd
     Influences:     James Joyce, Dante Alighieri, Jean Racine, Marcel Proust
     Influenced:     Václav Havel, Eugene Ionesco, John Banville, Harold Pinter,
                     Tom Stoppard, Sarah Kane, Marina Carr, J. M. Coetzee

   Samuel Barclay Beckett ( 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish
   dramatist, novelist and poet. Beckett's work is stark, fundamentally
   minimalist, and, according to some interpretations, deeply pessimistic
   about the human condition. The perceived pessimism is mitigated both by
   a great and often wicked sense of humour, and by the sense, for some
   readers, that Beckett's portrayal of life's obstacles serves to
   demonstrate that the journey, while difficult, is ultimately worth the
   effort. Similarly, many posit that Beckett's expressed "pessimism" is
   not so much for the human condition but for that of an established
   cultural and societal structure which imposes its stultifying will upon
   otherwise hopeful individuals; it is the inherent optimism of the human
   condition, therefore, that is at tension with the oppressive world. His
   later work explores his themes in an increasingly cryptic and
   attenuated style. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969
   "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the
   destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". Beckett was elected
   Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Biography

Early life and education

   The Beckett family (originally Becquet) were rumoured to be of Huguenot
   stock and to have moved to Ireland from France after the revocation of
   the Edict of Nantes in 1685, though this theory seems unlikely. The
   Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland. The family home,
   Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and
   garden complete with tennis court that was built in 1903 by Beckett's
   father William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding
   countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby
   Leopardstown Racecourse, Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street
   station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and
   plays.

   At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he first
   started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsford House School in the
   city centre near Harcourt Street. In 1919, Beckett went to Portora
   Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh—the school Oscar Wilde
   had also attended. A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a
   left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. Later, he was to
   play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against
   Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel laureate to
   have an entry in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the bible of cricket.

Early writings

   Beckett studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College, Dublin
   from 1923 to 1927. While at Trinity one of his tutors was the eminent
   Berkeley scholar and Berkelian Dr. A.A.Luce. Beckett graduated with a
   B.A., and—after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast—took up
   the post of lecteur d'anglais in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.
   While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by
   Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked
   there. This meeting was soon to have a profound effect on the young
   man, and Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, most particularly by
   helping him do research for the book that would eventually become
   Finnegans Wake. In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical
   essay entitled Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce. The essay defends Joyce's
   work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and
   dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His
   Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a book of essays on
   Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert
   McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams, among others. Beckett's close
   relationship with Joyce and his family, however, cooled when he
   rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia. It was also during
   this period that Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was
   published in Jolas' periodical Transition. The next year he won a small
   literary prize with his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws
   from a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading
   when he was encouraged to submit.

   In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. He soon
   became disillusioned with his chosen academic vocation, however. He
   expressed his aversion by playing a trick on the Modern Language
   Society of Dublin, reading a learned paper in French on a Toulouse
   author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism;
   Chas and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented
   by Beckett to mock pedantry.

   Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, terminating his brief
   academic career. He commemorated this turning point in his life by
   composing the poem "Gnome", inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang
   von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published
   in the Dublin Magazine in 1934:

          Spend the years of learning squandering
          Courage for the years of wandering
          Through a world politely turning
          From the loutishness of learning.

   After leaving Trinity, Beckett began to travel in Europe. He also spent
   some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical
   study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, in the wake of
   his father's death, he began two years treatment with Tavistock
   psychotherapist, Dr. Wilfred Bion, who took him to hear Carl Jung's
   third Tavistock lecture, an event which Beckett would still recall many
   years later. In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to
   Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to
   abandon it; the book would eventually be published in 1993. Despite his
   inability to get it published, however, the novel did serve as a source
   for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length
   book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.

   Beckett also published a number of essays and reviews around the time,
   including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman, August 1934) and
   "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems
   (in The Dublin Magazine, July–September 1934). These two reviews
   focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and
   Blanaid Salkeld, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival
   contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and the French
   symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming
   'the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland', Beckett was in fact
   tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.

   In 1935—the year that Beckett successfully published a book of his
   poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates—he was also working on his
   novel Murphy. In May of that year, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had
   been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei
   Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. In
   the summer of 1936, he wrote to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod
   Pudovkin, offering to become their apprentices. Nothing came of this,
   however, as Beckett's letter was lost due to Eisenstein's quarantine
   during the smallpox outbreak, as well as his focus on a script re-write
   of his postponed film production. Beckett, meanwhile, finished Murphy,
   and then in 1936 departed for extensive travel around Germany, during
   which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork
   that he had seen, also noting his distaste for the Nazi savagery which
   was then overtaking the country. Returning to Ireland briefly in 1937,
   he oversaw the publishing of Murphy (1938), which he himself translated
   into French the next year. He also had a falling-out with his mother,
   which contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris (where
   he would return for good following the outbreak of World War II in
   1939, preferring—in his own words—'France at war to Ireland at peace'
   Sometime around December 1937, Beckett had a brief affair with Peggy
   Guggenheim.

   In Paris, in January of 1938, while refusing the solicitations of a
   notorious pimp who ironically went by the name of Prudent, Beckett was
   stabbed in the chest and nearly killed. James Joyce arranged a private
   room for the injured Beckett at the hospital. The publicity surrounding
   the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil,
   who knew Beckett slightly from his first stay in Paris; this time,
   however, the two would begin a lifelong companionship. At a preliminary
   hearing, Beckett asked his attacker for the motive behind the stabbing,
   and Prudent casually replied, "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse"
   ("I do not know, sir. I'm sorry"). Beckett occasionally recounted the
   incident in jest, and eventually dropped the charges against his
   attacker—partially to avoid further formalities, but also because he
   found Prudent to be personally likeable and well-mannered.

World War II

   Beckett joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by
   Germany, working as a courier, and on several occasions over the next
   two years was nearly caught by the Gestapo.

   In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and Suzanne fled south on
   foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse
   département in the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region. Here he continued
   to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his
   home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he
   indirectly helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse
   mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work.

   Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la
   Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the
   German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would
   modestly refer to his work with the French Resistance as ' boy scout
   stuff'. '[I]n order to keep in touch', he continued work on the novel
   Watt (begun in 1941 and completed in 1945, but not published until
   1953) while in hiding in Roussillon.

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   In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay,
   he had a revelation in his mother’s room in which his entire future
   literary direction appeared to him. This experience was later
   fictionalized in the 1958 play Krapp's Last Tape. In the play, Krapp’s
   revelation is set on the East Pier in Dún Laoghaire during a stormy
   night, and some critics have identified Beckett with Krapp to the point
   of presuming Beckett's own artistic epiphany was at the same location,
   in the same weather.

   In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes published the
   first part of Beckett’s short story "Suite" (later to be called "La
   fin", or "The End"), not realizing that Beckett had only submitted the
   first half of the story; Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the
   second part. Beckett also began to write his fourth novel, Mercier et
   Camier, which was not to be published until 1970. The novel, in many
   ways, presaged his most famous work, the play Waiting for Godot,
   written not long afterwards, but more importantly, it was Beckett’s
   first long work to be written directly in French, the language of most
   of his subsequent works, including the "trilogy" of novels he was soon
   to write: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Despite being a native
   English speaker, Beckett chose to write in French because—as he himself
   claimed—in French it was easier for him to write 'without style'.

   Beckett is most renowned for the play Waiting for Godot. In a
   much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett "has
   achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens,
   that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the
   second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a
   play in which nothing happens, twice." ( Irish Times, 18 February 1956,
   p. 6.) Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in
   French with the title En attendant Godot. Beckett worked on the play
   between October 1948 and January 1949. He published it in 1952, and
   premiered it in 1953. The English translation appeared two years later.
   The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris.
   It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide
   turned with positive reactions by Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times
   and, later, Kenneth Tynan. In the United States, it flopped in Miami,
   and had a qualified success in New York City. After this, the play
   became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the
   U.S. and Germany. It is still frequently performed today.

   As noted, Beckett was now writing mainly in French. He translated all
   of his works into the English language himself, with the exception of
   Molloy, whose translation was collaborative with Patrick Bowles. The
   success of Waiting for Godot opened up a career in theatre for its
   author. Beckett went on to write numerous successful full-length plays,
   including 1957's Endgame, the aforementioned Krapp's Last Tape (written
   in English), 1960's Happy Days (also written in English), and 1963's
   Play.

   In 1961, in recognition for his work, Beckett received the
   International Publishers' Formentor Prize, which he shared that year
   with Jorge Luis Borges.

Later life and work

   The 1960s were a period of change, both on a personal level and as a
   writer. In 1961, in a secret civil ceremony in England, he married
   Suzanne, mainly for reasons relating to French inheritance law. The
   success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and
   productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a
   theatre director. In 1956, he had his first commission from the BBC for
   a radio play, All That Fall. He was to continue writing sporadically
   for radio, and ultimately for film and television as well. He also
   started to write in English again, though he continued to do some work
   in French until the end of his life.

   In 1969, Beckett, vacationing in Tunis with Suzanne, learned he had won
   the Nobel Prize for Literature. Suzanne, who saw that her intensely
   private husband would be, from that moment forth, saddled with fame,
   called the award a "catastrophe.". Still, Beckett often personally met
   the artists, scholars, and admirers who sought him out in the anonymous
   lobby of Paris' Hotel PLM, which was near his Montparnasse home.

   Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Beckett, suffering from emphysema and
   possibly Parkinson's disease and confined to a nursing home, died on
   December 22 of the same year. The two were interred together in the
   Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris, and share a simple marble
   gravestone which follows Beckett's directive that it be "any colour, so
   long as it's grey."

Works

   Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods:
   his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle
   period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which period
   he wrote what are probably his most well-known works; and his late
   period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during
   which his works tended to become shorter and shorter and his style more
   and more minimalist.

Early works

   Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly
   under the influence of the work of his friend James Joyce in that they
   are very erudite, sometimes seeming to display the author's learning
   merely for the sake of displaying it. As a result, they can, in places,
   be quite obscure. The opening phrases of the short-story collection
   More Pricks than Kicks (1934) can serve as an example of this style:

     It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in
     the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor
     forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained
     the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place
     where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had
     it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every
     particular.

   The passage is rife with references to Dante Alighieri's Commedia,
   which can serve to confuse readers not familiar with that work. At the
   same time, however, there are many portents of Beckett's later work:
   the physical inactivity of the character Belacqua; the character's
   immersion in his own head and thoughts; the somewhat irreverent comedy
   of the final sentence.

   Similar elements are present in Beckett's first published novel, Murphy
   (1938), which also to some extent explores the themes of insanity and
   chess, both of which would be recurrent elements in Beckett's later
   works. The novel's opening sentence also hints at the somewhat
   pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's
   works: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new'.
   Watt, written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World
   War II, is similar in terms of themes, but less exuberant in its style.
   This novel also, at certain points, explores human movement as if it
   were a mathematical permutation, presaging Beckett's later
   preoccupation—in both his novels and dramatic works—with precise
   movement.

   It was also during this early period that Beckett first began to write
   creatively in the French language. In the late 1930s, he wrote a number
   of short poems in that language, and these poems' spareness—in contrast
   to the density of his English poems of roughly the same period,
   collected in Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935)—seems to show
   that Beckett, albeit through the medium of another language, was in
   process of simplifying his style somewhat, a change also evidenced in
   Watt.

Middle period

   After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language
   as a vehicle. It was this, together with the aforementioned
   "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin—in which,
   basically, he realized that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly
   from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which
   Beckett is probably best remembered today.

   During the 15 years subsequent to the war, Beckett produced four major
   full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting
   for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame), Krapp's Last Tape
   (1958), and Happy Days (1960). These plays—which are often considered,
   rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "
   Theatre of the Absurd"—deal in a very blackly humorous way with themes
   similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers,
   though Beckett himself cannot be pigeonholed as an existentialist.
   Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the
   will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an
   uncomprehending and, indeed, incomprehensible world. The words of
   Nell—one of the two characters in Endgame who are trapped in ashbins,
   from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best
   summarize the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period:

     Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes,
     it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh,
     with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes,
     it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it
     funny, but we don't laugh any more.

   Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the
   three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies) and
   L'innommable (1953; The Unnamable). In these novels—sometimes referred
   to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit
   wishes—the reader can trace the development of Beckett's mature style
   and themes, as the novels become more and more stripped down, barer and
   barer. Molloy, for instance, still retains many of the characteristics
   of a conventional novel—time, place, movement and plot—and is indeed,
   on one level, a detective novel. In Malone Dies, however, movement and
   plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication
   of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the
   form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The Unnamable, all sense of
   place and time are done away with, and the essential theme seems to be
   the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to
   continue existing and its almost equally strong urge to find silence
   and oblivion. It is tempting to see in this a reflection of Beckett's
   experience and understanding of what the war had done to the world.
   Despite the widely-held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the
   novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live
   seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final
   phrase of The Unnamable: 'I can't go on, I'll go on'.

   Subsequent to these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to
   produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief
   "stories" later collected as Texts for Nothing. In the late 1950s,
   however, he managed to create one of his most radical prose works,
   Comment c'est (1961; How It Is). This work relates the adventures of an
   unnamed narrator crawling through the mud whilst dragging a sack of
   canned food, and was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs
   in a style approaching telegraphese:

     you are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then
     it's over you are there no more alive no more then again you are
     there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all
     over more or less in the same place or in another as when another
     image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark

   Following this work, it would be almost another decade before Beckett
   produced a work of non-dramatic prose, and indeed How It Is is
   generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer.

Late works

   Throughout the 1960s and on into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited
   an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the
   1950s—towards compactness that has led to his work sometimes being
   described as minimalist. The extreme example of this, among his
   dramatic works, is the 1969 piece Breath, which lasts for only 40
   seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer
   ironic comment on Oh! Calcutta!, the theatrical revue for which it
   served as an introductory piece).

   In the dramas of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in
   number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements.
   The ironically titled 1962 Play, for instance, consists of three
   characters stuck to their necks in large funeral urns, while the 1963
   television drama Eh Joe—written for the actor Jack MacGowran—is
   animated by a camera that steadily closes in to a tight focus upon the
   face of the title character, and the 1972 play Not I consists almost
   solely of, in Beckett's words, 'a moving mouth with the rest of the
   stage in darkness'. Many of these late plays, taking a cue from Krapp's
   Last Tape, were concerned to a great extent with memory, or more
   particularly, with the often forced recollection of haunting past
   events in a moment of stillness in the present; it is in this treatment
   of a species of involuntary memory that Beckett most clearly reveals
   his debt to the French novelist Marcel Proust, about whom Beckett had
   written a monograph in 1931. Moreover, as often as not these late plays
   dealt with the theme of the self confined and observed insofar as a
   voice either comes from outside into the protagonist's head, as in Eh
   Joe, or else the protagonist is silently commented upon by another
   character, as in Not I. Such themes also led to Beckett's most
   politically charged play, 1982's Catastrophe, dedicated to Václav
   Havel, which dealt relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship.
   After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a
   revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of
   mirlitonnades, some as short as six words long. These defied Beckett's
   usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into
   the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon,
   have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence
   has been published in English.

   Though Beckett's writing of prose during the late period was not so
   prolific as his writing of drama—as hinted at by the title of the 1976
   collection of short texts entitled Fizzles, which was illustrated by
   American artist Jasper Johns—he did experience something of a
   renaissance in this regard beginning with the 1979 novella Company, and
   continuing on through 1982's Ill Seen Ill Said and 1984's Worstward Ho.
   In the prose medium of these three so-called '"closed space" stories',
   Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its effect on the
   confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies
   in space, as the opening phrases of Company make clear:

     A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine.

     To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on
     his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes
     and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is
     said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your
     back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is
     said.

   Beckett's final work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word", was written in
   bed in the nursing home where he spent the last days of his life, and
   also exists in a French version, comment dire.

Legacy

   Of all the English-language modernists, Beckett's work represents the
   most sustained attack on the realist tradition. He, more than anyone
   else, opened up the possibility of drama and fiction that dispense with
   conventional plot and the unities of place and time in order to focus
   on essential components of the human condition. Writers like Václav
   Havel, John Banville, Aidan Higgins and Harold Pinter have publicly
   stated their indebtedness to Beckett's example, but he has had a much
   wider influence on experimental writing since the 1950s, from the Beat
   generation to the happenings of the 1960s and beyond. In an Irish
   context, he has exerted great influence on writers like John Banville,
   Derek Mahon, Thomas Kinsella, as well as writers like Trevor Joyce and
   Catherine Walsh who proclaim their adherence to the modernist tradition
   as an alternative to the dominant realist mainstream.

   Many major 20th-century-composers, including Luciano Berio, György
   Kurtág, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass and Heinz Holliger, have created
   musical works based on his texts. Beckett's work was also an influence
   on many visual artists, including Bruce Nauman, Alexander Arotin, and
   Avigdor Arikha; Arikha, in addition to being inspired by Beckett's
   literary world, also drew a number of portraits of Beckett and
   illustrated several of his works.

   Beckett is one of the most widely discussed and highly prized of
   twentieth-century authors, inspiring a critical industry to rival that
   which has sprung up around James Joyce. has divided critical opinion.
   Some early philosophical critics, such as Sartre and Theodor Adorno,
   praised him, one for his revelation of absurdity, the other for his
   works' critical refusal of simplicities; others such as Georg Lukacs
   condemn for 'decadent' lack of realism.

   Since Beckett's death, all rights for performance of his plays are
   handled by the Beckett estate, currently managed by Edward Beckett, the
   author's nephew. The estate has a reputation for maintaining firm
   control over how Beckett's plays are performed and does not grant
   licences to productions that do not strictly adhere to the stage
   directions.

   Some of the best known pictures of Beckett were taken by photographer
   John Minihan, who photographed him between 1980 and 1985 and developed
   such a good relationship with the writer that he became, in effect, his
   official photographer. Some consider one of these to be among the top
   three photographs of the 20th century. However, it was the theatre
   photographer John Haynes who took possibly the most widely reproduced
   image of Beckett: it is used on the cover of the Knowlson biography,
   for instance. This portrait was taken during rehearsals at the Royal
   Court Theatre in London, where Haynes photographed many productions of
   Beckett's work.

   Actor Cary Elwes explains in his video diary of The Princess Bride that
   Samuel Beckett was a neighbour of the Roussimoff family while living in
   France. He used to give one of the Roussimoff sons, André René, a lift
   to school every day, since the boy was unable to take the school bus
   owing to his large size. André René Roussimoff would, in later years,
   go on to become the famed professional wrestler André the Giant.
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