Beckett's fiction--begun in almost slavish admiration of the other great Irishman in exile, James Joyce--has caused him to be lumped loosely at various times within literary subgroups such as absurdists, experimentalists, existentialists, or the creators of the French nouveau roman. He has been labeled Proustian, Joycean, Sartrean, Jungian, and even a Christian writer, but while he does exhibit characteristics of each, such limitations are reductive.
In recent years, both his drama and his fiction have taken an intensely personal turn, and critics have begun to recognize the extensive biographical underpinnings of his abstractly theoretical musings. Of his seemingly protean output, Katharine Worth has commented that Beckett "can only be surely placed as a man of many facets, the writer above all who has sensed the deep movements of the modern imagination and found spellbinding images to express them."
Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Stillorgan district of Dublin on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, a date to which he has imparted significance in some of his dramatic writings. His parents were comfortably situated members of the Anglo-Irish professional class, descendants of Huguenots who had fled from France to Ireland in the late seventeenth century to avoid religious persecution and to find the freedom to practice their successful professions in the linen trade.
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