When Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1969, the Swedish Academy stated that it was for "a body of work that in new forms of fiction and the theatre, has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation." At the time of the award, Beckett's persistent innovation in works stretching back to the late 1920s led many to view him as the foremost modernist still living, and the sixty-three-year-old was widely recognized as the leading playwright in the world. Not only did his plays and novels irrevocably influence world theater and European literature, but also his associations with artists and his significant art criticism manifest a cultural influence that spread through all of the arts across Europe and the United States. While he spent most of his life in France and wrote his most celebrated work first in French, Beckett was Irish, and, along...