Samuel beckett biography james knowlson obituary

  • Nearing the end of his life, Samuel Beckett chose James Knowlson to be his biographer because he "knows my work best." One of the world's leading authorities on.
  • Samuel Beckett's long-standing friend, James Knowlson, recreates Beckett's youth in Ireland, his studies at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1920s.
  • Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly recreates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb.

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    DAMNED TO FAME
    The Life of Samuel Beckett.
    By James Knowlson.
    Illustrated. 800 pp. New York:
    Simon & Schuster. $35.

    IN 1986 a leading scholar of Samuel Beckett's writing said, ''I have found biography to be of little help in understanding the works of Samuel Beckett.'' Three years later Beckett asked this doubter, James Knowlson, to write his biography.


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    ''Damned to Fame'' is not the first life of Beckett, of course. Notably, there was Deirdre Bair's 1978 biography, which drew on many letters she had discovered from Beckett to his friend Tom MacGreevy. They dispel the notion of Beckett as a philosophical recluse and show him as a man whose troubles shaped his writing. Mr. Knowlson has had full access to the MacGreevy letters, unlike Ms. Bair, and to six notebooks reporting Beckett's mind-altering trip through Germany in 1936-37. He added dozens of other sources. Beckett died six months after Mr. Knowlson

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    Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett

    January 20, 2020
    Samuel Beckett was regarded as one of the great literary eggheads of the 20th century, and I suppose his reputation is deserved, though the work he is most famous for, the teaterpjäs Waiting For Godot, fryst vatten as subtle as the Three Stooges' Oily To Bed, oljig To Rise.

    Over-rated as a dramatist, there is an undeniable greatness to his fiction, particularly the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable>. But there fryst vatten also an undeniable dullness in much of Beckett’s writing. It’s a curious kind of dullness, though. It’s not quite boring enough to get you to close the book, it’s just irritating enough, with just enough of a dash of morbid humor to keep you turning the page. Beckett was the great historieberättare of the modern mittpunkt gazer, the man with too much time on his hands, who, instead of living, thought about living (what the intellectuals call *existence*) and fretted endlessly about death.

    He had keen insight into the kind of

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    Damned to Fame

    Grove Press
    Grove Press
    Grove Press

    The Life of Samuel Beckett

    byJames R. Knowlson

    Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize–winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett’s chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly re-creates Beckett’s life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989, revealing the real man behind the literary giant. Scrupulously researched and filled with previously unknown information garnered from interviews with the author and his friends, family, and contemporaries, Knowlson’s unparalleled work is the definitive Beckett biography of our time.

    TagsLiteraryEuropean/English

    “A magnificent biography . . . Damned to Fame splendidly preserves the truths embodied in Beckett’s life.” –J. D. O’Hara, The New York Times Book R

  • samuel beckett biography james knowlson obituary