Word: dubliner
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...year-old Ackermann was born in Sweden, where her father was a foreign service officer. Ackermann attended schools in Dublin, France, and Washington D.C. before graduating from Smith College in 1945 with a B.A. in Greek and Latin. During that year she married Paul Ackermann and spent the next 17 years teaching, proofreading, editing and writing while she raised two children...
Mary Charles Dublin...
...adds nothing major to them. But her accretion of small details softens the hard edges of Beckett's known past and published works. Born into a prosperous Irish Protestant family in 1906, Beckett was a crashingly normal, if sometimes diffident lad up through his graduation from Trinity College, Dublin. His skill with languages brought him a two-year fellowship in Paris and the promise of a teaching post at Trinity when he finished. In Paris, Beckett joined the circle of acolytes surrounding James Joyce; the young Irishman's first published work was an essay championing his senior countryman...
...Back in Dublin, Beckett at first played the weary Continental poseur, then, to his parents' horror, degenerated quickly into a bum. The cause was a crippling depression that left him spending weeks bed, curled in the fetal position, his body racked with apparently psychosomatic symptoms: boils, cysts, headaches, flu, bursitis. Beckett tried to fight by drinking heavily and flying into periodic rages. When these attempts failed, he began cultivating an air of contemptuous indifference to the world and its pains. "All I want to do," he told a friend, "is sit on my ass and fart and think...
...patent leather pumps that were too small because he wanted to wear the same shoe in the same size as Joyce, who was very proud of his small, neatly shod feet. Joyce had been vain about his feet since his youth, when poverty forced him to go about Dublin in a pair of white tennis shoes, the only footwear he owned. It is impossible to know if Joyce was even aware of Beckett's slavish gesture, for his eyes were so weak that he saw very little. What is intriguing about this imitative gesture is the sacrificial element involved...