Author Topic: Beckett resources  (Read 16423 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Iain Fisher

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1885
    • Iain Fisher
Re: Beckett resources
« Reply #5 on: August 12, 2008, 06:54:28 PM »
Portraits of Beckett by painter Tom Phillips



http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/portrait/sbec/

Offline Iain Fisher

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1885
    • Iain Fisher
Dutch resources
« Reply #4 on: August 12, 2008, 06:53:15 PM »
A site in Dutch   www.samuelbeckett.nl/Home.htm

However the news page (activiteiten) is four years out of date.

Offline Iain Fisher

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1885
    • Iain Fisher
Re: Beckett resources
« Reply #3 on: August 12, 2008, 06:41:03 PM »
More biography  www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc7.htm

"...Beckett made his way through Ireland, France, England, and Germany, all the while writing poems and stories and doing odd jobs to get by. In the course of his journies, he no doubt came into contact with many tramps and wanderers, and these aquaintances would later translate into some of his finest characters. Whenever he happened to pass through Paris, he would call on Joyce, and they would have long visits, although it was rumored that they mostly sit in silence, both suffused with sadness.

Beckett finally settled down in Paris in 1937. Shortly thereafter, he was stabbed in the street by a man who had approached him asking for money. He would learn later, in the hospital, that he had a perforated lung. After his recovery, he went to visit his assailant in prison. When asked why he had attacked Beckett, the prisoner replied "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur", a phrase hauntingly reminiscent of some of the lost and confused souls that would populate the writer's later works..."

Offline Iain Fisher

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1885
    • Iain Fisher
Re: Beckett resources
« Reply #2 on: August 12, 2008, 06:39:47 PM »
A reasonable biography of Beckett  www.kirjasto.sci.fi/beckett.htm

"...Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin into a prosperous Protestant family. His father, William Beckett Jr., was a surveyor. Beckett's mother, Mary Roe, had worked as a nurse before marriage. He was educated at the Portora Royal School and Trinity College, Dublin, where he took a B.A. degree in 1927, having specialized in French and Italian. Beckett worked as a teacher in Belfast and lecturer in English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. During this time he became a friend of James Joyce , taking dictation and copying down parts of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake (1939). He also translated a fragment of the book into French under Joyce's supervision..."

and

"Beckett lived on the rue St. Jacques. At the neighborhood cafe he met his friends, drank espresso, and smoke thin cigarettes. He also had a country house outside Paris. Beckett maintained his usual silence even when his eightienth birthday was celebrated in Paris and New York. At the age of seventy-six he said: "With diminished concentration, loss of memory, obscured intelligence... the more chance there is for saying something closest to what one really is. Even though everything seems inexpressible, there remains the need to express. A child need to make a sand castle even though it makes no sense. In old age, with only a few grains of sand, one has the greatest possibility." (from Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimpton, 2000)

Beckett's wife died in 1989. The author had moved just previously to a small nursing home, after falling in his apartment. Beckett lived in a barely furnished room, receiving visitors, writing until the end. From his television he watched tennis and soccer. His last book printed in his lifetime was STIRRING STILL (1989). Beckett died, following respiratory problems, in a hospital on December 22, 1989. It it rumored that Beckett gave much of the Nobel prize money to needy artists"

Offline Iain Fisher

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1885
    • Iain Fisher
Beckett resources
« Reply #1 on: August 12, 2008, 06:36:05 PM »
A nice image from Quad



it is from the Samuel Beckett Society, Antwerp, Belgium.  There is various information on this site, but it is not as informative as it could be.

www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=*SBECKETT&n=22071