Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Stillorgan district of Dublin on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, a date to which he has imparted significance in some of his dramatic writings and a date which has had an almost mystical significance to him in his personal life. Both the Christian belief in Good Friday as the date of the death of Christ and the attendant theory that one of the two thieves who was to have been crucified with him was saved while the other was damned are ideas which Beckett has used in various forms throughout his writings. Also, he sometimes uses the date and place of his birth as a possible explanation of his introspective personality. His parents were comfortably situated members of the Anglo-Irish professional class, descendants of Huguenots who had fled from France to Ireland in the late seventeenth century to avoid religious persecution. In Ireland, Beckett's ancestors found the freedom to practice their successful professions in the linen trade. Worth mentioning in your term paper that William Frank Beckett, Jr., Samuel Beckett's father, was a robust man and jovial sportsman who had no affinity for intellectual endeavor and who left school at the age of fifteen to build a significant reputation and sizable fortune in the exacting profession of quantity surveying (the business of estimating from architects' drawings the amount of material necessary to construct a building).

Beckett's mother was born Mary Jones Roe in Leixlip, county Kildare, and her father listed his profession as "gentleman," meaning that he lived off the income of his family's milling business and had no profession of his own. Mary Roe Beckett, called May, was strong-willed and independent, and, at a time when young women of good family were not expected to work, she trained as a nurse and worked in a Dublin hospital before her marriage. Of the two parents, she was the more rigid and demanding, and her role in Beckett's life has led to conflicting and mostly troubled representations of her in his writings. Although all his plays have attracted respectable audiences, Beckett has become well known more because of Waiting for Godot than any of his other works. Waiting for Godot is a very popular custom essay topic. It has been published in numerous languages and in so many editions that Beckett has lost count. Editions of all the other plays combined do not come close to this achievement. With his novels, total sales in France are less than 50,000 copies, and the figure is not much higher in all English language editions.