Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, Dublin, in 1906. Though his early interests were athletic—he played on the cricket and rugby teams at the Portora Royal School in Northern Enniskillen—he studied and excelled in French and Italian at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1928 Beckett began a two-year-exchange fellowship at l’Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he befriended the Irish writer James Joyce and became a member of his intellectual and social circle. A decade later, in 1937, after teaching in Dublin and traveling through Europe, he decided to take up permanent residence in Paris. With the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Beckett became a member of the French Resistance Movement, whose objective was subversive and sabotage activity against the Nazis to assist the advance of the Allied armed forces. Afterwards he was awarded the croix de guerre and other citations for his work in the French underground. For approximately two years in the postwar era, Beckett concentrated on writing fiction, most notably novels such as Mercier & Camier, Murphy, Molloy, and Malone Dies. He acquired the habit of writing first in French, then translating his works into English, believing that in this way he avoided verbal superfluity.
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