About
Samuel Barclay Beckett ( ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, often coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. A major figure of Irish literature, he is best remembered for his 1953 play Waiting for Godot, and he is considered to be one of the last modernist writers, as well as a key figure in what Martin Esslin called, the "Theatre of the Absurd." Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."