Samuel Beckett

With the production of En attendent Godot (1952, Waiting for Godot) in Paris in 1954, Beckett became one of the most influential and controversial playwrights of the contemporary theater. His characters confront the mystery and despair of the human condition with a resigned determination. Beckett wrote his earliest works in English, but most of his later novels and plays in French. Among his works are the novels Murphy (1938) and Molloy (1951) and the plays Fin de partie (1957, Endgame) and Happy Days (1961). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.