Samuel Beckett was born in Cooldrinagh, Foxrock, Co Dublin, Ireland into a prosperous Protestant family in 1906. His father, William Beckett Jr., was a quantity surveyor. His mother, Mary Roe, was a nurse. He was educated at the Trinity College, Dublin, where he obtained a B.A. degree in 1927, specializing in French, Italian and English.
    In 1928 Beckett moved to France and lectured English at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. It was at this time that he was introduced to James Joyce by Thomas Macgreevy. He eventually became a good friend to the older Joyce, and assisted with taking dictation and copying down parts of what would eventually become Finnegans Wake.
    In 1931 Beckett returned to Dublin and received his M.A. in 1931. He taught French at Trinity College until 1932 when he resigned, moved back to France and devoted his time entirely to writing. Among his early works were: Dream of Fair to Middling Women, More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy.
    In January 1938, beckett was stabbed by a pimp who had solicited for money. It was while recovering in the hospital that he met Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil and they got married in 1961. After he had fully recovered, Beckett had visited his assailant in prison. His enquiry on the boy's reason for his action was meant with an inconsequential response: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur" ("I do not know, Sir"). This grim state of incomprehensibility and Nihilism was to define the state of mind of Beckett's characters, who were mainly the Common man: vagrants, pimps, tramps and the dregs of the society.
    Thereafter, Beckett wrote copiously. Among his many later works were the famous triology: Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. However, it was his plays: Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957) and Krapp's Last Tape (1959), that were to bring him world acclaim and establish him as one of the foremost masters of literature. But Beckett is most famous for Waiting for Godot.
    In the traditional theatre, the style of theatre production was naturalism and realism. Then, drama, either written or performed, aimed at capturing life realistically. And for a long time, it was this realistic mode of dramatic representation that defined theatre and theatrical convention, and also the standard and criteria with which most plays were judged to be either good, or bad, or ugly. Beckettian theatre, came to challenge this realistic mode. It presents an alternative to theatre as an instrument of naturalistic and narrative conventions, and invariably become an instrument for the expressions of anti-literary attitude:
    The aesthetic construct of Beckettian theatre is that it does not "rely on the traditional elements of drama. He trades in plot, characterization, and final solution.... Language is useless, for he creates a mythical universe peopled by lonely creatures who struggle vainly to express the unexpressable. His characters exist in a terrible dreamlike vacuum, overcome by an overwhelming sense of bewilderment and grief, grotesquely attempting some form of communication, then crawling on, endlessly."
    Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. The quotation above is an extract from his Nobel Prize award citation. Beckett continued to write until his death on 22nd December 1989.