Samuel Beckett

Born: Dublin, Ireland, on April 13, 1906 into a Protestant, middle class home.

Beckett often suffered from depression growing up and stated, "I had little talent for happiness." He usually slept most of the day and didn't like to have long conversations with people. He thought that the feelings he had were not  human. His sense of depression show up in much of his writing, where it is a struggle to get through life or about the meaninglessness of life.

Beckett traveled Ireland, France, England, and Germany and while writing his poems and stories at the same time. In 1937 he made his way to Paris where he would permanently call his home. Shortly after moving there, he was stabbed in the street by a man who had begged him for money. This incident probably made him more depressed as seen in his writing.

All of Beckett's major works were written in French because he thought he could be more discipline with his writing. He was also one of the first absurdist play writers to win international fame. His works have been translated into over twenty languages and in 1969 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, but towards the end he remarked that each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."

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