Undoing Time: The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett

Since his death in 1989, it has become difficult to imagine that Samuel Beckett was once a virtually unknown writer. Born in 1906 into a respectable middle-class family in a Dublin suburb, he came late to fame in the early 1950s with the ground-breaking play, Waiting for Godot. Since Godot, his writing has been translated, published, and staged throughout the world.
This highly accessible and original narrative account offers a new opportunity to engage with a towering figure of Irish and world literature. It offers a systematic overview of his best-known and most popular work, in poetry, drama, prose, radio and television along with his more difficult pieces. Original close readings explore his transformative work on language and form. For Beckett, life was a matter of doing time, while writing was a way of undoing it. In the process, writer, audiences and readers enter into a different understanding of how it is to be human.