50 Fun Facts About Samuel Beckett

In which country was Samuel Beckett born?

He was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock in 1906 but lived most of his adult life in Paris.

In which year did Beckett win the Nobel Prize in Literature?

He heard the news on holiday in Tunis; his wife Suzanne called it a catastrophe.

Which Irish novelist did Beckett assist with research for Finnegans Wake?

They were introduced in Paris by the poet Thomas MacGreevy; the friendship cooled when Beckett rejected the novelist's daughter Lucia.

In which language did Beckett write most of his works after 1947, including his most famous play?

He said it was easier for him to write 'without style' in his adopted language, then translated almost everything into English himself.

Under what title was Beckett's most famous play first published, in 1952?

He composed it between October 1948 and January 1949 and never sold or gave away its manuscript.

What are the names of the two main characters in Beckett's most famous play?

They call each other Didi and Gogo and pass the time by a leafless tree.

In Beckett's most famous play, what is the name of the servant who is led about on a rope by Pozzo?

He delivers a long, torrential monologue when ordered to 'think'.

Who directed the 1953 Paris premiere of Beckett's most famous play at the Theatre de Babylone?

Beckett's partner Suzanne had sent the manuscript to producer after producer before finding him.

Which painting did Beckett cite as a major inspiration for his most famous play?

Caspar David Friedrich painted it in 1819; Beckett was a serious student of art history throughout the 1930s.

In a 1998 poll by London's Royal National Theatre, what distinction was Beckett's best-known work voted?

Ironically the London opening in 1955 drew mostly negative reviews until Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan turned the tide.

Which critic coined the term 'Theatre of the Absurd', with Beckett as its centrepiece?

Esslin tied the plays to Camus's idea of the absurd, which is why Beckett is often wrongly called an existentialist.

Where in Enniskillen, also attended by Oscar Wilde, was Beckett educated as a teenager?

He then went up to Trinity College Dublin to study modern literature and Romance languages.

Beckett is the only Nobel literature laureate to have played which sport at first-class level?

A left-handed batsman and left-arm bowler, he played twice for Dublin University against Northamptonshire and so appears in Wisden.

At which Paris institution did Beckett work as an English lecteur from 1928 to 1930?

It was there that Thomas MacGreevy introduced him to Joyce.

Beckett's prize-winning 1930 poem 'Whoroscope' draws on a biography of which philosopher?

He was reading the biography when encouraged to enter, and dashed the poem off in a hurry.

What was unusual about the poet Jean du Chas and le Concentrisme, subject of Beckett's 1930 Trinity lecture?

He later insisted the parody was not meant to fool the audience; he resigned his lectureship the next year.

What was Beckett's first novel, written in 1932 but not published until 1992?

After many rejections he abandoned it, but mined it for poems and the story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.

What was Beckett's first published novel, from 1938, with chess and insanity among its themes?

Its opening line reads: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.'

Which psychoanalyst treated Beckett at London's Tavistock Clinic for two years after his father's death?

Traces of the analysis surface in his later novels and plays.

In 1936 Beckett wrote to which Soviet film director offering himself as an apprentice?

The letter was lost because the director was quarantined during a smallpox outbreak.

What happened to Beckett on a Paris street in January 1938?

He dropped the charges, partly because he found his attacker, Prudent, likeable and well-mannered.

Which art collector had a brief affair with Beckett around 1937 and nicknamed him 'Oblomov'?

The nickname came from Goncharov's famously lethargic fictional nobleman.

With which artist did Beckett regularly play chess in Left Bank cafes?

He also befriended Alberto Giacometti and chose to stay in Paris after war broke out.

What was the name of the Resistance network for which Beckett worked as a courier?

After it was betrayed in 1942 he and Suzanne fled on foot to the village of Roussillon.

How did Beckett later describe his Resistance work?

France nonetheless awarded him the Croix de Guerre in 1945.

Which novel did Beckett write while hiding in the village of Roussillon during the war?

Started in 1941 and finished in 1945, it did not appear in print until 1953.

After the war Beckett managed stores at an Irish Red Cross hospital in which Normandy town?

He described it in an unbroadcast radio script called 'The Capital of the Ruins'.

Where did Beckett have the 1945 'revelation' that set the direction of his later work?

He realised his way lay in 'impoverishment' and subtraction, the opposite of Joyce's ever-expanding method.

Which Beckett play fictionalises the revelation, with a man hearing tapes of his younger self?

Krapp fast-forwards before the audience can hear the key words, which Beckett said were 'precious ally'.

Which magazine, edited by Sartre, mistakenly printed only half of Beckett's 'Suite' in 1946?

Co-editor Simone de Beauvoir refused to print the second half.

Which Paris publishing house, run by Jerome Lindon, published Beckett's novels of the early 1950s?

It brought out his three great post-war novels between 1951 and 1953.

Which novel completes the group Molloy, Malone Dies and ..., called a trilogy against Beckett's wishes?

In it almost all sense of place and time is abolished; the voice simply struggles to keep speaking.

In Endgame, the characters Nagg and Nell live inside what?

Nell delivers the line 'Nothing is funnier than unhappiness', a motto for the whole middle period.

How long does Beckett's late piece Breath last?

It has no characters and served as an ironic curtain-raiser for the revue Oh! Calcutta!

In Beckett's Play (1962), the three characters are immersed up to their necks in what?

A spotlight interrogates each of them in turn as they retell a love triangle.

Beckett's 1972 play Not I consists almost solely of what on stage?

Billie Whitelaw, his favoured actress, delivered its torrent of words with the rest of the stage in darkness.

To which imprisoned dissident, later a president, did Beckett dedicate his 1982 play Catastrophe?

It is his most politically charged play and deals with dictatorship.

Which future professional wrestler did Beckett drive to school outside Paris in the 1950s?

Andre Roussimoff recalled that the two mostly talked about one sport, and little else.

With whom did Beckett share the inaugural International Publishers' Formentor Prize in 1961?

That same year he married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England, for reasons of inheritance law.

What was the name of Beckett's lifelong partner, later his wife, whom he met after the 1938 stabbing?

She became his agent and hawked the Godot manuscript to producers until they found a director.

What instruction did Beckett give about the look of his gravestone?

He and Suzanne, who died five months before him in 1989, share a granite stone in a Paris cemetery.

In which Paris cemetery is Beckett buried?

He lived nearby and met visitors in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques.

Under what pseudonym did Beckett sometimes write?

Belacqua, by contrast, is the Dante-derived hero of his early fiction.

Which relative manages Beckett's estate, refusing stagings that ignore his directions?

Beckett himself refused to let Waiting for Godot be filmed, though he allowed television.

Which Irish honour, the highest of the artists' association Aosdana, was Beckett the first to hold in 1984?

He also received an honorary doctorate from Trinity in 1959 and an English Heritage blue plaque in Chelsea in 2016.

Critic Vivian Mercier famously summed up Waiting for Godot as a play in which what happens?

He called it 'a theoretical impossibility', noting that the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first.

Where was Beckett on holiday when he learned he had won the 1969 Nobel Prize?

His wife Suzanne called the award a 'catastrophe', fearing the fame it would bring her intensely private husband.

In which Dublin suburb was Samuel Beckett born in 1906?

His father William was a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent and his mother Maria a nurse; both were 35 when he was born.

Which American artist illustrated Fizzles, Beckett's 1976 collection of short prose texts?

The title hints at how sparse his late prose had become before the novella Company brought something of a renaissance in 1980.

Why did Beckett marry Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England in 1961?

The couple had been together since the late 1930s; she died in July 1989, five months before him.