Biography of dr don beckett

Irish writer (–)

This article is about the Irish writer. For the Quantum Leap character, see Sam Beckett. For the vessel of the Irish Naval Service named after Beckett, see LÉ Samuel Beckett (P61).

Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April – 22 December ) was an Irish-born writer of novels, plays, short stories and poems. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. Beckett is best remembered for his 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.^[1]

A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. His later works became increasingly minimalistic as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference.

•

Modern Literature Collection Authors

Samuel Beckett () was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for the most of his adult life. Writing in English and French, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in , "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and teaterpjäs - in the tillstånd av extrem fattigdom of modern man acquires its elevation."* His best-known play, En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) () is a comic study of philosophical uncertainty, and, like much of his work, focuses on the absurdity of human existence. Beckett graduated from Dublin’s Trinity College in and settled in Paris, where he worked with James Joyce and published short stories and the novel Murphy (). During World War II, he joined the French Resistance and was eventually forced to leave Paris, but after the war he returned and wrote most of his important works, including Godot, the prose trilogy

•

The last days of Samuel Beckett

Dr John Wallace looks at the controversial decision by Samuel Beckett’s GP to place the ageing Nobel Prize winner in an austere, State-run nursing home in Paris

{openx}
Although his health was robust throughout his life, the writer Samuel Beckett suffered from emphysema, which was exacerbated by years of smoking cheap cigarettes in the cafes and bars of Paris. By , however, he was 80 years old and his health was in serious decline.
Beckett had experienced dyspnoea for some time and he began to use oxygen more frequently around this time. He had also suffered a number of falls and his friends had begun to suspect that he was not eating properly when he was at home.
In July , the Irish writer fell while in the Parisian apartment that he shared with his wife Suzanne. Beckett’s GP transferred him to a local hospital to determine the cause of the fall.
The young doctor then organised for the Nobel Prize winner, by now a rich man, to move in