Publication of Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett wrote this play in French, as En attendant Godot, in the late 1940s, and it reached print before its first performance in Paris in January 1953. Two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait by a bare tree for a man called Godot who never arrives, passing the time in bickering, games and encounters with the domineering Pozzo and his servant Lucky. With almost no plot, it became the defining work of the Theatre of the Absurd, reflecting uncertainty and the human need to keep hoping. Beckett himself translated it into English, and it brought him lasting fame and, in 1969, the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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