Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot was one of the most influential works for the post-World War II generation, has long been identified with the debilitated and impotent characters he created. In this provocative book, Lois Gordon offers a new perspective on Beckett, challenging the prevalent image of him as reclusive, self-absorbed, and disturbed. Gordon investigates the first forty years of Beckett's life and finds that he was, on the contrary, a kind and generous man who responded sensitively and even heroically to the world around him. Gordon describes the various places and events that affected Beckett during this formative period: war-torn Dublin during the Easter Uprising and World War I, where he spent his childhood and student days; Belfast and Paris in the 1920s and London during the Depression, where he lived and worked; Germany in 1937, where he traveled and witnessed Hitler's brutal domestic policies; prewar and occupied France, where he was active in the Resistance (for which he was later decorated); and the war-ravaged town of Saint-L� in Normandy, which he helped to restore following the liberation. Gordon also portrays the individuals who were important to Beckett, including Jack B. Yeats, Alfred P�ron, Thomas McGreevy, and, most significantly, James Joyce, who was a model for Beckett personally, artistically, and politically. Gordon argues convincingly that Beckett was very much aware of the political and cultural turmoil of this period and that the enormously creative works he wrote after World War II can, in fact, be viewed as a product of and testament to those tumultuous times.

The World of Samuel Beckett brings together a distinguished group of authorities, among them Beckett's longtime associates and colleagues Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin. In a chapter on Beckett's "Enough," Blau concedes that parts of the playwright's work can be lyrical and beguiling, but "it's still an appalling vision." Esslin (who coined the term "theater of the absurd") challenges the notion that Beckett is difficult or depressing, arguing instead that he is basically a comic writer, gallows humor thought it be. Angela Moorjani sees Beckett's writing as the product of a cryptic text inscribed within. Bennett Simon, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on Beckett, examines the self in current art and psychoanalysis. Joseph H. Smith emphasizes that Beckett, like Freud and Lacan, challenges any notions of "cure" as the easy achievement of happiness.

A powerful, genre-defying meditation, with Beckett at its origin, that touches on mysteries as varied as literary celebrity, baseball, and why we feel the need to be cruel to one another Following the schema of Samuel Beckett's unpublished "Long Observation of the Ray," of which only six manuscript pages exist, poet and critic Michael Coffey interleaves multiple narratives according to an arithmetic sequence laid out by Beckett in his notes. This rhythm of themes and genres--involving personal memoir, literary criticism, Beckett studies, contemporary political reportage and accounts of state-sponsored torture in appropriated texts, plus an Arabian Tale and even a baseballplay-by-play--produce a work at once sculptural, theatrical, mathematical and above all lyrical, a new form of narrative answering to a freshened rule set. In executing Beckett's most radical undertaking--one scholar referred to "Long Observation of the Ray" as a "monument to extinction"--Coffey gives readers access to an open field in which ruminations on writing mix with an engagement with Beckett scholarship as well as the unsettling chaos in today's world. Although Beckett, like any writer, had his share of abandoned works, he was in the habit of "unabandoning" on occasion. Coffey's effort here salvages a Beckett project from a half-century ago and brings it to the surface, with the contemporary markings of its hauling.

Samuel Beckett has become the standard work on the enigmatic, controversial, and Nobel Prize-winning creator of such contributions to 20th-century theater as Waiting for Godot and Endgame. 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.

The global reception of Samuel Beckett raises numerous questions: in which areas of the world was Beckett first translated? Why were Beckett texts sometimes slow to penetrate certain cultures? How were national literatures impacted by Beckett's oeuvre? Translating Samuel Beckett around the World brings together leading researchers in Beckett studies to discuss these questions and explore the fate of Beckett in their own societies and national languages. The current text provides ample coverage of the presence of Beckett in geographical contexts normally ignored by literary criticism, and reveals unknown aspects of the 1969 Nobel Prize winner interacting with translators of his work in a number of different countries.

The essays in this collection provide in-depth analyses of Samuel Beckett's major works in the context of his international presence and circulation, particularly the translation, adaptation, appropriation and cultural reciprocation of his oeuvre. A Nobel Prize winner who published and self-translated in both French and English across literary genres, Beckett is recognized on a global scale as a preeminent author and dramatist of the 20th century. Samuel Beckett as World Literature brings together a wide range of international contributors to share their perspectives on Beckett's presence in countries such as China, Japan, Serbia, India and Brazil, among others, and to flesh out Beckett's relationship with postcolonial literatures and his place within the 'canon' of world literature.