Celebrity Graveland

April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, Ireland, just outside of Dublin. He studied literature at Trinity College. He played cricket. He traveled. He wrote. While teaching in Paris – a city that would eventually become his full-time home – Beckett met fellow Irish author James Joyce and their interactions and relationship would eventually solidify the direction of Beckett’s literary career. By the time he was 40, he realized that, while Joyce pushed for knowledge as fuel for his creativity, Beckett himself was better suited to embrace his own “ignorance”. This decision freed Beckett up to concentrate his writings on the everyday absurdity and bleakness of life.

Beckett wrote poems, novels, critical essays and plays. His most famous work is arguably the 1953 masterpiece Waiting for Godot. The generally plot-less play was written in French and later translated to English (as much of his later work was) and both thrilled and baffled audiences and critics. While living in Paris, Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a pimp and later spent time driving a young André the Giant to school. Bleakness and absurdity, indeed, followed Beckett throughout his life.

In his later years, Beckett took up directing. He continued to write, of course. In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was intensely private, but known to be amiable to those with whom he met. His bold decisions to reject realism and expected structure influenced countless authors, playwrights and filmmakers in the later 20th century and beyond. Beckett died in a Paris nursing home at the age of 83. He requested that his grave marker be “any colour, so long as it’s grey”.

Burial

Montparnasse Cemetery – Paris, FRANCE

Specific Location

Division 12; Along Avenue Transversale on the southern edge of section 12.

This entry was posted on September 11, 2023 at 9:12 am and is filed under Montparnasse Cemetery with tags Montparnasse Cemetery, Playwrights, Poets, Writers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.