Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, who created a world of everlasting despair and left theatergoers "Waiting for Godot," died at age 83 of respiratory failure and was buried Tuesday, his publisher said.
The playwright, poet and novelist whose work depicted death and decay as mankind's sole and inescapable destiny, was buried this morning at Montparnasse Cemetery in a private ceremony, said publisher Jerome Linden.The playwright died Friday in Paris, Linden said.
The Irish-born author of "Godot" and "Endgame" rejected the redeeming optimism that might have made him more accessible to a mass audience and gained him earlier recognition as one of the century's greatest writers.
His was a stark world peopled with vagabond couples trapped by an apocalyptic sense of doom and caught in a never-ending, master-slave dialectic often laced with wry Irish humor.
Beckett's work was a cry of agony and compassion at the hopeless misery, futility and loneliness of human existence, which he called a slow death.
That theme reappears in the dozens of plays, novels, poems and short stories he wrote in both French and English during a career that spanned more than 50 years.
Critics were scandalized by his experiments on the stage. "Breath," which premiered in 1970, had no actors, no dialogue and no action - just a heap of gloomily lit garbage cans onstage, a baby's screams and the amplified sound of heavy breathing. The play lasted just 30 seconds.
Until French director Roger Blin rescued the long-published but never performed "Waiting for Godot" from obscurity in 1952, Beckett's pessimistic and often difficult style limited his audience to an intellectual elite.
The play, about two tramps waiting for a third, was a huge success and brought the author instant renown. It was translated into and performed in more than 20 languages, and it helped Beckett win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969.
Always shy and withdrawn, Beckett refused to attend the award ceremonies in Stockholm. He sent his publisher instead and fled to Tunisia to escape the media. The citation described Beckett as "a pioneer of a new modesty of expression in fiction and the theater . . . whose writing rises like a cry for mercy from all mankind."
Beckett was secretive about his private life. He granted few interviews, and was one of a handful of writers to refuse to appear on "Apostrophes" - France's most popular book review television show.
Even the date of Beckett's birth was wrapped in mystery. He said he was born in Dublin on Good Friday, April 13, 1906. But his biographer, Deirdre Bair, suggested he was really born a month earlier, with Beckett shifting it to the anniversary of the crucifixion as a symbolic boost to his self-made legend.
The son of a surveyor, Beckett enjoyed a comfortable, upper-middle class Protestant upbringing. Though he said he had "a happy childhood," he once admitted to "always feeling lonely."
He studied modern languages at Trinity College, Dublin, and first came to Paris in 1928 to lecture in Engish at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure.
In Paris he met another Irish exile, James Joyce, who was to have a profound influence on his future writing. "Joyce had a moral effect on me," Beckett said later. "He made me realize the meaning of artistic integrity."