Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett
Regular price
€25.99
14 days return policy
Shipping & Delivery
A01=James Knowlson
Actors writers directors
Author_James Knowlson
Billie Whitelaw
Category=DNB
Category=DSBH
Category=DSG
Category=DSK
Childhood child
Early youth friendship
Edward Albee
English studies study background
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Friend long standing time
Happy Days Production Notebook
Images portrait
International success
Ireland based growing up
J. M. Coetzee
James Joyce friend
Literary literature life
Memories remembering
Mother relationship
Novelist poet dramatist
Official biographer biography
Paris resistance work
Play playwright
Sam previously unpublished
Second World War 2 two WW2
Theatrical Krapp's Last Tape
Trinity College Dublin
Waiting for Godot remembering
Product details
- ISBN 9780747531692
- Weight: 746g
- Dimensions: 128 x 197mm
- Publication Date: 04 Sep 1997
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
_______________
‘A triumph of scholarship and sympathy... one of the great post-war biographies' - Independent
‘A landmark in scholarly criticism... Knowlson is the world's largest Beckett scholar. His life is right up there with George Painter's Proust and Richard Ellmann's Joyce in sensitivity and fascination' - Daily Telegraph
‘It is hard to imagine a fuller portrait of the man who gave our age some of the myths by which it lives' - Evening Standard
_______________
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD PRIZE
_______________
Samuel Beckett's long-standing friend, James Knowlson, recreates Beckett's youth in Ireland, his studies at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1920s and from there to the Continent, where he plunged into the multicultural literary society of late-1920s Paris.
The biography throws new light on Beckett's stormy relationship with his mother, the psychotherapy he received after the death of his father and his crucial relationship with James Joyce. There is also material on Beckett's six-month visit to Germany as the Nazi's tightened their grip.
The book includes unpublished material on Beckett's personal life after he chose to live in France, including his own account of his work for a Resistance cell during the war, his escape from the Gestapo and his retreat into hiding.
Obsessively private, Beckett was wholly committed to the work which eventually brought his public fame, beginning with the controversial success of "Waiting for Godot" in 1953, and culminating in the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.
James Knowlson is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of
Reading where he founded the Beckett Archive (now the Beckett
International Foundation). He was a friend of Samuel Beckett for twenty
years and is his authorised biographer, publishing Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett
with Bloomsbury in 1996. He has written or edited many other books and
essays on Beckett and modern drama, including most recently Images of Beckett with theatre photographer John Haynes.
