Photograph by Roger Pic
(1906 - 1989)
Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, a play that won him worldwide fame, “as a relaxation, to get away from the awful prose I was writing at that time,” the prose being his novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Unhappy in the public eye, he declined in 1969 to accept his Nobel Prize in Literature in person.
If I had the use of my body I would throw it out of the window.
—Samuel Beckett, 1951Miscellany
During his first trip to New York City in 1964, Samuel Beckett went to a doubleheader at Shea Stadium with his friend Dick Seaver, who explained the game of baseball to the Irish writer. Halfway through the second game, Seaver asked, “Would you like to go now?” To which Beckett replied, “Is the game over, then?” “Not yet,” said Seaver. Beckett concluded, “We don’t want to go then before it’s finished.” The Mets won both games, unlike their double loss two months earlier in what had been the longest doubleheader in Major League history, clocking in at nine hours and fifty-two minutes.
