Samuel Beckett is an Irishman who has lived in France since 1938 and who has written much of his drama and fiction in French. The phenomenal success of his play En attendant Godot (1952; published in English as Waiting for Godot, 1954) has made him known throughout the world and given a new vocabulary to our time. Indeed, his reputation has been made in the theater, even though he is stubbornly insistent that his novels constitute his most important writing, and it is they by which he wishes to be judged. Even though much of his writing since 1945 has been for the theater, he thinks of his plays as diversions undertaken at times when his work on fiction has come to creative impasses. The fact is that he has created a significant body of fiction that has caused him to be ranked among the most influential writers of the last half of the twentieth century.
