Samuel Beckett Trivia
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48 free Samuel Beckett trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Samuel Beckett trivia quiz covers the Dublin-born writer who moved to Paris, switched to writing in French and produced the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century. The easy questions cover his nationality, his most famous play, the prize he won in 1969 and the great Irish novelist he assisted as a young man. From there the quiz walks through the life: Portora and Trinity, the lectureship he abandoned, the pimp who stabbed him, the Resistance network he ran messages for, the revelation in his mother's room and the partner who hawked the Godot manuscript to producers. The hard end covers the pseudonym, the poem about Descartes, the invented poet he lectured on, the trilogy of novels he refused to call a trilogy, the 35-second play, the funeral urns and the disembodied mouth, the wrestler he drove to school, the BBC script editor, the gravestone instruction and the nephew who now polices his stage directions. Expect questions for casual theatre-goers and for people who have read the letters. Every answer was checked against Beckett's encyclopaedia entry and the Waiting for Godot entry before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our James Joyce and classic literature quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which phrase ends Beckett's much-quoted lines from Worstward Ho about trying again and failing again?
Fail better
Fail better. The tennis champion Stan Wawrinka, who won Grand Slam titles after years of defeats, had the lines tattooed along his left forearm.
Q 02Who collected Beckett's 1969 Nobel Prize in his place?
His publisher
His publisher, Jerome Lindon, went in his place. Beckett accepted the prize but would not face the ceremony and the speech it required, and he made no public statement.
Q 03Which Irish novelist did the young Beckett befriend in Paris and help with research?
James Joyce
James Joyce never employed him as a secretary, as is often said: Beckett was a friend and aide who ran research errands and read aloud to him as his eyesight worsened.
Q 04In which language did Beckett write most of his works after 1947, including his most famous play?
French
French, he said, made it easier to write 'without style'. He then translated most of the work into English himself.
Q 05In which Beckett play is Winnie buried up to her waist, then up to her neck, in a mound of earth?
Happy Days
Happy Days. Sinking into the earth, Winnie still brushes her teeth, puts on her hat and declares 'Oh this is a happy day' to a husband who barely answers.
Q 06What are the names of the two main characters in Beckett's most famous play?
Vladimir and Estragon
Vladimir and Estragon call each other Didi and Gogo. Told that the pair talked as if they had PhDs, Beckett replied: 'How do you know they hadn't?'
Q 07In Beckett's most famous play, what is the name of the servant who is led about on a rope by Pozzo?
Lucky
Lucky carries the bags in silence until ordered to 'Think!', when he pours out a torrent of scrambled scholarship that stops only when his hat is pulled off.
Q 08Who directed the 1953 Paris premiere of Beckett's most famous play at the Theatre de Babylone?
Roger Blin
Roger Blin picked it over Beckett's other script partly because it needed fewer actors, then had to play Pozzo himself, a pillow padding his stomach, when his actor left.
Q 09Which Romantic painter's moonlit scene of two figures did Beckett call the source of his most famous play?
Caspar David Friedrich
Caspar David Friedrich. Beckett saw his moon-watchers on a tour of German galleries in 1936-37 and, a dozen years on, wrote two men waiting by a tree; accounts differ on which twin canvas he meant.
Q 10A 1998 National Theatre poll voted Beckett's best-known work what, among plays in English?
The century's most significant play
The century's most significant play in English, ahead of Death of a Salesman. In 1955 London's daily critics had dismissed it, until Harold Hobson's Sunday Times review came to its rescue.
Q 11Which critic coined the term 'Theatre of the Absurd', with Beckett as its centrepiece?
Martin Esslin
Martin Esslin tied the plays to Albert Camus's idea of the absurd, one reason Beckett is so often labelled an existentialist.
Q 12At which Enniskillen institution, also attended by Oscar Wilde, was the teenage Beckett educated?
Portora Royal School
Portora Royal School lay in what became Northern Ireland: Beckett arrived around 1920, and partition in 1921 put a border between him and his family home near Dublin.
Q 13Uniquely among Nobel literature laureates, Beckett played which sport at the highest domestic level as a student?
Cricket
Q 21What happened to Beckett on a Paris street in January 1938?
He was stabbed by a pimp
He was stabbed by a pimp named Prudent, whose approaches he had refused. Asked afterwards why he had done it, the man could only say that he did not know and was sorry, and Beckett dropped the charges.
Q 22Which art collector had a brief affair with Beckett around 1937 and nicknamed him 'Oblomov'?
Peggy Guggenheim
Peggy Guggenheim named him after Goncharov's hero, a man so overcome by apathy, she said, that he 'finally did not even have the willpower to get out of bed'.
Q 23With which artist did Beckett regularly play chess in Left Bank cafes?
Marcel Duchamp
Cricket earned him an obituary in Wisden: a left-handed batsman, he played two first-class matches for Dublin University against Northamptonshire.
Q 14At which Paris institution did Beckett work as an English lecteur from 1928 to 1930?
Ecole Normale Superieure
The Ecole Normale Superieure took him on a two-year exchange from Trinity College Dublin. The poet Thomas MacGreevy, already teaching English there, became his close friend and his way into literary Paris.
Q 15Beckett's prize-winning 1930 poem 'Whoroscope' draws on a biography of which philosopher?
Rene Descartes
Rene Descartes speaks the poem himself. Beckett, who happened to be reading a life of the philosopher, wrote it in a few hours for Nancy Cunard's contest for a poem about time, and won.
Q 16What was unusual about the poet Jean du Chas, subject of Beckett's 1930 Trinity lecture?
Beckett had invented him
Beckett had invented him, along with his movement, le Concentrisme. The spoof paper mocked academic pedantry, and a year later he resigned his own lectureship.
Q 17What was Beckett's first novel, written in his twenties but not published until 1992?
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
Dream of Fair to Middling Women was turned down by publishers, so Beckett shelved it and quarried it for the stories of More Pricks Than Kicks.
Q 18What was Beckett's first published novel, from 1938, with chess and insanity among its themes?
Murphy
Murphy was turned down by 42 publishers before Routledge took it. Its opening line runs: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.'
Q 19Which psychoanalyst treated Beckett at London's Tavistock Clinic for two years after his father's death?
Wilfred Bion
Wilfred Bion's patient was in the audience for one of Carl Jung's Tavistock Lectures in 1935, and traces of the analysis resurface in Beckett's later novels and plays.
Q 20In 1936 Beckett wrote to which Soviet film director offering himself as an apprentice?
Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Eisenstein never answered the letter of March 1936, in which Beckett asked to be taken on at the Moscow film school, and the would-be film-maker stayed a writer.
Marcel Duchamp had all but swapped art for the board by then: he played for France in international tournaments, and a friend recalled that he 'only played chess'.
Q 24Beckett's Resistance network was betrayed to the Germans in 1942 by a double agent of which profession?
A Catholic priest
A Catholic priest, the abbé Robert Alesch, betrayed the Gloria network to the Germans. Warned by telegram, Beckett and his partner left their Paris flat at once and went into hiding.
Q 25How did Beckett later describe his Resistance work?
"Boy scout stuff"
"Boy scout stuff" was his own shrugging verdict on it. France thought otherwise and awarded him the Croix de Guerre in 1945.
Q 26Which novel did Beckett write while hiding in the village of Roussillon during the war?
Watt
Watt kept him going: by day he worked as a farm labourer, and at night he wrote the novel, as he put it, 'to stay sane'. It was not published until 1953.
Q 27After the war Beckett worked at an Irish Red Cross hospital in which devastated Normandy town?
Saint-Lo
Saint-Lo had been left in ruins by the 1944 fighting, which is why Beckett called the radio script he wrote about the hospital 'The Capital of the Ruins'.
Q 28Where did Beckett have the post-war 'revelation' that set the direction of his later work?
His mother's room in Dublin
His mother's room in Dublin, not the storm-swept pier where a later play of his sets the scene. He saw that his way lay in 'impoverishment', in taking away rather than adding.
Q 29Which one-man Beckett play fictionalises his post-war revelation, as an old man revisits his younger self's words?
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp's Last Tape. Krapp winds the reel on before the audience can hear the vital words, which Beckett later said were 'precious ally'.
Q 30Which co-editor of Sartre's magazine Les Temps modernes refused to print the second half of Beckett's story 'Suite'?
Simone de Beauvoir
Simone de Beauvoir had run the first half in 1946, taking it for the complete story, and then refused to print the rest. It later appeared in full as 'The End'.