Samuel Beckett

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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 Author name Sort descending Excerpt
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, Vol.
66
, pp. 188-14.
189
During the second world war she became...
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 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...
Literary responses Sarah Kane
Meanwhile fellow-playwright Mark Ravenhill , having initially concluded from the reviews that this was a bad play, was astonished at reading the first few lines and knowing that I was in the hands of a...
Reception Sarah Kane
A propos the Sheffield production of 2015, Alan Bennett commented on the difficulty of achieving realism with such extreme violence: how can a character mutilated on stage be shown as having attention for anything at...
Literary responses Anna Kavan
Jonathan Lethem revisited Ice in the New York Times fifty years after it appeared, in advance of its anniversary re-issue as a Penguin classic. His notice opened arrestingly: Anna Kavan's Ice is book like the...
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.
60-1
Tristan Tzara became a...
Textual Production Ella K. Maillart
A travel book by EKM (composed in French and first published as Oasis interdites: de Pékin au Cachemire) appeared in English as Forbidden Journey: From Peking to Kashmir, translated by Thomas McGreevy ...
Intertextuality and Influence Iris Murdoch
Her omnivorous reading during the last year of her degree included the major modern novelists, notably including Proust and Woolf (the darling dangerous woman who made her feel quite incapable of writing anything straight...
Residence Edna O'Brien
Her cluttered writing room has an arbutus desk, books (many of them signed gifts from their authors), candles, paintings, the faded and fraying tapesty carpet, and images of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett presiding at...
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...
Occupation Harold Pinter
He acted for this company for a year and learned a lot. He worked his way up in Shakespearean roles from bit parts to major ones and discovered the writings of Samuel Beckett .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Occupation Harold Pinter
Always keen on acting, HP played the solo protagonist of Beckett 's Krapp's Last Tape in a wheelchair at the Royal Court Upstairs , in a run that began on 14 October 2006 (because an...

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