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Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906 into a Protestant middle-class family. He graduated in modern languages at Trinity College in Dublin in 1928, and then he became English lecturer at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. This experience convinced him to settle in Paris, where he came into contact with many intellectuals, above all with James Joyce and his circle. During this period he published a collection of short stories, a novel Murphy (1938), and his first essays.

At the breakout of World War II he joined the French Resistance and in order to escape the Gestapo Police, he worked undercover as a farm labourer in Avignone for a while. He supported himself mostly with translations and wrote a partly autobiographical novel called "Watt" (1944), which somehow anticipates the more widely know triligy: Molly. Malone Dies and The Unnameable (1951/53).

The novels of the trilogy were originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself only later. This was due to a deliberate choise on behalf of Beckett who belive that by writing in a foreign language, he was forcing himself to achieve greater discipline, economy of expression, as dictated by his main objective: an attempt to explore and describe the human condition.

European fame came with the performance of his first play, En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) in Paris in 1953. In 1969 he was awarded the Noble Prize for literature. He spent the rest of his life writing plays, till the year of his death in 1989.

The plays

Made widely popular by Waiting for Godot (1952 in French; 1954 in English), Beckett ent on writing for the theatre for over twenty years, introducing what is know today as The Theatre of the Absurd.

This is a kind of drama that attempts to portray and analyse the essential question fo the meaning of life in a period when religious explanation have ceased to be valid, and as Nietzsche said "God is dead".

This situation places man in the dilemma of being unable to find any essential purpose in his action, that is the dilemma of existentialism and of having to invent purposes and meaning for his life.

Beckett's plays always deal with the inability to communicate and loneliness. 

In "Endgame" (1958), for example, the protagonist, Hamm can neither walk not sit down and his parents are legless.

In "Krapp's last tape" (1958), a one-act play, an old man listens to a tape recorded when he was younger, and maybe happier. The confessions of the voice on the tape seem to him those of a total stranger.

In "Happy Days" (1961), a play with only two characters, the woman is buried to the waist in Act I and to the neck in Act II and the man can only crawl on all fours.