Three Novellas

by Samuel Beckett

These three stories were written in French shortly after the war and translated into English in the fifties, two of them in collaboration with Richard Seaver. They are a bridge between the early novels written in English and the Molloy trilogy. These three stories are rich in verbal and situational humour and the preoccupations which are fairly constant throughout the work of a writer who has not only transformed the art of the novel and contemporary theatre, but has given to both academics and the general reader a corpus of work of inexhaustible interest.

Genres: Short Stories

67 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.