Modernism - Literary Movements, 20th Century French Literary Biography, 20th Century Irish Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, Irish Literary Biography, 19th Century French Literature - Literary Criticism, 20th Century French Literature - Lit

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist

Name: Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist
Author: Isaac Cronin
ISBN: 9780306808982

by Isaac Cronin

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Overview

Beckett criticism is well known for its use of impenetrable jargon in describing the themes in his famous novels, poems and especially his seminal plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame. This book is a decided contrast. Written by one of Beckett's contemporaries, it provides a humanizing portrait of Beckett that has been conspicuously missing from previous biographies.

Spanning nearly the whole of the twentieth century, Beckett's life was full of romantic, exciting incidents and fascinating characters such as James Joyce and Peggy Guggenheim. He met his wife as a result of being stabbed by a pimp on the street, was a member of the French Resistance, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 and in later years became a famous figure on the Left Bank. He died on December 22, 1989.

Cronin regards Beckett as the last of the great modernists and discusses his life and work in this context. The result is a thoroughly engaging addition to the criticism on one of the century's greatest literary figures, one that belongs on the shelves of all lovers of Beckett.

Synopsis

Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic, Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers. Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature both as a man and a writer. Cronin explores how the sporty schoolboy of solid Protestant bourgeois stock became a prizewinning student at Trinity, flirted with scholarship, and, in Paris, found himself at the center of its literary avant-garde as an intimate friend of James Joyce. But he was a young man who struggled with complexities in his own nature as well as with problems of literary expression. In the small provincial city of Kassel, Germany, the cosmopolitan Beckett experienced a faltering entanglement with his cousin—one of the first in a series of problematic encounters with women. The war years, which he spent as a member of the Resistance and a refugee in the South of France, brought Beckett the self-probings and discoveries that led to the great works. Then, with his sudden and astonishing fame, the balloons of myth began to inflate and a stereotype was born—frozen in exile and enigma, solemnity and sanctity. Anthony Cronin bursts these balloons to see more clearly what lies behind. Without moralizing or psychologizing, without pretensions or piety, he uncovers the real Beckett, the way the life was lived, the way the art was made.

About the Author, Isaac Cronin

Anthony Cronin is a poet, novelist, broadcaster, editor, and author of No Laughing Matter, a celebrated biography of Flann O'Brien. He lives in Dublin, Ireland.