Samuel Beckett

:For other things named Beckett, see Beckett (disambiguation)

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 due to 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 1959 he had his first commission from the BBC for a radio play, Embers. He was to continue writing for radio and ultimately for film, with the work Film (1964), and, from the mid 1970s, for television. He also started to write in English again, although he continued to do some work in French until the end of his life.

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This new-found fame, coupled with the Nobel award, meant that academic interest in the life and work grew, creating eventually something of a 'Beckett industry'. Other writers also started to seek out Beckett, with the result that a steady stream of students, poets, novelists and playwrights passed through Paris hoping to meet the master. In 1961, he published his last full-length prose work, Comment C'est (How It Is, 1964). This work, written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese, relating the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud with a sack of canned food, is generally considered to mark the end of Beckett's middle period as a writer.

Related Topics:
1961 - How It Is - 1964

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There followed a series of short minimalist plays and prose works exploring themes of the self confined and observed. Beckett came to focus more clearly on his long-standing opposition to the tyranny of realism in art and of what he viewed as the dictatorship of social norms and expectations. In the 1982 play Catastrophe, dedicated to Václav Havel, he turned his attention to harder forms of dictatorship. In the last ten years of his life, this minimalist style resulted in three of Beckett's most important prose works, the three novellas Company (1979), Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) and Worstward Ho (1984). His last work, the poem "What is the Word" (1989), was written in bed in the nursing home where he spent the last period of his life, suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease.

Related Topics:
1982 - Václav Havel - Emphysema - Parkinson's disease

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Suzanne died on July 17 1989. Beckett died on December 22 that same year and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France. His gravestone is a massive slab of polished black granite. Chiseled into its surface is "Samuel Beckett 1906–1989" below the name and dates for Suzanne, who is buried with him. At the foot of his grave stands one lone tree, a reminder of the stage set for his most famous play.

Related Topics:
July 17 - 1989 - December 22 - Cimetière du Montparnasse - Paris, France - Gravestone

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