Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, in Foxrock, a pleasant suburb south of Dublin. He grew up in a Protestant Anglo-Irish family, attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen—the same school that Oscar Wilde had attended decades earlier—and went on to study modern languages at Trinity College Dublin, graduating with first-class honors in French and Italian.
After a period of teaching in Belfast, Beckett moved to Paris in 1928 as an exchange lecturer at the École Normale Supérieure. There, he became closely associated with James Joyce, serving as a trusted assistant and close friend. This relationship had a profound impact on him—not just as a writer but as someone who grasped the depths of pushing language to its limits. He returned to Dublin briefly, attempted an academic career, found it unsatisfactory, and ultimately settled in Paris for good in the late 1930s.
“During World War II, Beckett chose to remain in occupied France instead of returning to the safety of neutral Ireland.”
He joined the French Resistance, acting as a courier for an intelligence network until it was betrayed to the Gestapo in 1942. He and his partner Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil escaped on foot to the unoccupied south, hiding in the village of Roussillon for the rest of the war. Beckett later remarked that he preferred France at war to Ireland at peace.
The years right after the war saw a remarkable surge in his writing. Between 1946 and 1950, he produced the novels that would become the Molloy trilogy, along with the play that would bring him fame: *En attendant Godot*, which he wrote in French and later translated into English himself as *Waiting for Godot*. He opted to write in French partly because it compelled him to eliminate the verbal embellishments that came too easily in his native English.
