“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Samuel Beckett
-
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.
Connections
| Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
|---|---|---|
| Anthologization | Ann Quin | AQ
published a handful of short stories and articles in various journals, including Nova, the London Magazine, transatlantic review, and Antigonish Review. Sewell, Brocard, and Colin Wilson. Like Black Swans: Some People and Themes. Tabb House, 1982. 186 |
| death | Harriet Shaw Weaver | Samuel Beckett
, hearing of the news in Paris, remarked to Sylvia Beach
: I . . . shall think of her when I think of goodness. Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking, 1970. 455 |
| Friends, Associates | Nancy Cunard | NC
established important relationships in Paris: with Dadaist Tristan Tzara
, Louis Aragon
, American writers Janet Flanner
and Solita Solano
, and photographer Man Ray
. Clements, Patricia. “’Transmuting’ Nancy Cunard”. Dalhousie Review, pp. 188 -14. 189 |
| Friends, Associates | Cecily Mackworth | Her literary circle in Paris was highly eclectic: the many camps in which she had friends included the Surrealist rump, the incoming Existentialists, and the Communists (who were mostly ex-Surrealists). Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987. 60-1 |
| Health | Nancy Cunard | At this time medical expenses in connection with a bad arm had cost her 20,000 francs. Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987. 121 Tayler, Christopher. “Under–the–Table–Talk”. London Review of Books, No. 6, pp. 19 -23. 19 |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Iris Murdoch | |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Anne Carson | AC
's contributions include rendering Fragment 286 by the Greek poet Ibykos
in the manner successively of various more modern voices: John Donne
, Samuel Beckett
, Franz Kafka
, an FBI
report on Bertolt Brecht |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Edna O'Brien | EOB
uses books as presiding spirits of her own writing. James Joyce
's image is at one end of the mantelpiece and Samuel Beckett
's at the other. . . . I write by hand... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Shelagh Delaney | SD
wrote her first and most successful play, A Taste of Honey, at the age of nineteen. Published interviews give conflicting reports of her motivation for writing it. One interview quotes her as saying... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Anne Devlin | After writing for television, AD
was drawn to live theatre because of the medium's relative freedom from censorship and its enduring qualities: It is Literature. When you create a character in the theatre you are... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Margaret Drabble | The protagonist of this book, ageing Francesca Stubbs, is employed as an inspector of retirement homes. She and the other characters here, witnessing the ends' of friends' lives and approaching their own, make sense of... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Christine Brooke-Rose | CBR
looked to Pound
for technique and Beckett
for morale, appreciating in each his obstinate humour in the face of despair. Hayman, David, and Keith Cohen. “An Interview with Christine Brooke-Rose”. Contemporary Literature, No. 1, pp. 1 - 23. 14 |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Zoë Fairbairns | This time only, ZF
uses a male voice for a coming-of-age story, which holds up its narrator-protagonist to mockery and a kind of despairing sympathy, as it begins with some slight adolescent petulance and becomes... |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Christine Brooke-Rose | Influenced by Samuel Beckett
's Malone Dies, this novel perpetually delays action: We'll go on as if. As if for instance I were someone else, Cassandra perhaps. Brooke-Rose, Christine. Amalgamemnon. Carcanet, 1984. 7 Birch, Sarah. Christine Brooke-Rose and Contemporary Fiction. Clarendon Press, 1994. 118 |
| Intertextuality and Influence | Christine Brooke-Rose | This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:... |
Timeline
1949
1955
Copies of Molloy by Samuel Beckett
and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
(both published in France) were seized by British Customs.
By early November 1973
Experimental novelist B. S. Johnson
prefaced his short-story volume Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? with a polemical critique listing only sixteen serious contemporary British writers.