Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish writer of novels, plays, short stories, and poems. Writing in both English and French, his literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic episodes of life, often coupled with black comedy and literary nonsense. A major figure of Irish literature and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, he is best remembered for his play Waiting for Godot (1953). As one of the last modernist writers, he was a key figure in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd." For his lasting contributions, Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation."