Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting for Godot has influenced several generations of contemporary playwrights throughout the world, is a dramatist who considers himself a much better novelist. He thinks of his plays as diversions undertaken at times when work on his fiction has brought him to a creative impasse, but since Waiting for Godot was first performed (as En attendant Godot) in Paris on 5 January 1953, the greater part of his literary career has resulted in some form of writing for the theater.

An Irishman who has lived in Paris since 1938, Beckett writes in French and is a one-time follower of the other great Irish writer in exile, James Joyce. He has been lumped loosely at various times with groups ranging from the French nouveau roman to the existentialists, and his plays place him in the center of the theater of the absurd, one of the major movements in...