Death of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett died on 22 December 1989 in 14th arrondissement of Paris, aged 83. An Irish writer, Beckett was born near Dublin, studied at Trinity College, and moved to Paris in the late 1920s, where he became friends with James Joyce. He settled there permanently, took part in the French Resistance during the war and wrote in both French and English. His play Waiting for Godot, first staged in Paris in 1953, in which two men wait in vain for someone who never arrives, made him a central figure of the Theatre of the Absurd. His other works include the plays Endgame and Happy Days and the novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, which have a minimalist, bleak and darkly comic style. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.

Open on the timeline