Word: beckett
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...even Samuel Beckett, the Irish pessimist who was born on Good Friday--the 13th--and whose fondest artistic hope was to "fail better," might have smiled at the glory of it all. Beckett (1906-89) would have been 90 this year, and to celebrate his indelible mark on the modern spirit, the Gate Theatre of Dublin came to New York City's Lincoln Center with productions of all 19 works he wrote for the stage, from the full-length Waiting for Godot, Endgame and Happy Days to the 40-second Breath. (Another 13 pieces were composed for radio...
...Beckett Festival, which ended last week, is fresh evidence of a bustling industry devoted to the Nobel-prizewinning author. He has inspired more than 100 books, including three essential studies this year: Mel Gussow's Conversations with and About Beckett (Grove Press) and two biographies--Lois Gordon's The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 (Yale University Press) and an authorized life, Damned to Fame, by Beckett scholar James Knowlson (due in October from Simon & Schuster). Knowlson's book is reverent, exhaustive--3,361 footnotes!--and full of fine detail on Beckett's dogged, monastic creativity. If anyone could know...
Together, the plays and books paint the fullest portrait yet of an artist whose vision of human existence as a painful, poignant marking of time between the crib and the crypt helped define our world view in the atomic age. In doing so, they correct the canard that Beckett's work is boring, mired in gloom; the Gate pieces were darkly funny and passionate. And they reveal Beckett, who may seem so forbidding and remote as to be of another species, as a stoic but gentle man, a hero of the French Resistance and a generous soul--he once impulsively...
...Beckett was born near Dublin, into a comfortable Irish Protestant family. At Trinity College, Dublin, Sam was first in his class. He studied in Paris and discovered as strong a love for the city as he had a hatred for the small-mindedness of old Eire. Sam went home thereafter only to see his family, especially his mother May, whose lingering death from Parkinson's disease touched him as he stared into her pained eyes. "These are the first eyes I think I truly see," he wrote to a friend, in a letter cited in Knowlson's biography...
...wartime France, Beckett joined a Resistance group; his jobs were to send coded messages abroad (some would say he did the same thing as a writer) and later, when he and his future wife Suzanne moved to the southern part of the country, to hide weapons. He earned the Croix de Guerre for exploits that were not in his nature; he once hid grenades and dynamite on his front porch, in plain sight, because he was afraid they'd go off inside...