The Letters of Samuel Beckett – serie

The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett's unique voice and sensibility. The Cambridge University Press edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett offers for the first time a comprehensive range of letters of one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. Selected for their bearing on his work from over 15,000 extant letters, the letters published in this four-volume edition encompass sixty years of Beckett's writing life (1929-1989), and include letters to friends, painters and musicians, as well as to students, publishers, translators, and colleagues in the world of literature and theatre. For anyone interested in twentieth-century literature and theatre this edition is essential reading, offering not only a record of Beckett's achievements but a powerful literary experience in itself.

This second volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett opens with the war years, when it was often impossible or too dangerous to correspond. The surge of letters beginning in 1945, and their variety, are matched by the outpouring and the range of Beckett's published work. Primarily written in French and later translated by the author, the work includes stories, a series of novels (Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable), essays and plays - most notably En attendant Godot. The letters chronicle a passionately committed but little known writer evolving into a figure of international reputation, and his response to such fame. The volume provides detailed introductions which discuss Beckett's situation during the war and his crucial move into the French language, as well as translations of the letters, explanatory notes, year-by-year chronologies, profiles of correspondents and other contextual information.

This third volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett focuses on the years when Beckett is striving to find a balance between the demands put upon him by his growing international fame, and his need for the peace and silence from which new writing might emerge. This is the period in which Beckett launches into work for radio, film and, later, into television. It also marks his return to writing fiction, with his first major piece for a decade, Comment c'est (How It Is). Where hitherto he has been reticent about the writing process, now he devotes letter after letter to describing and explaining his work in progress. For the first time Beckett has a woman as his major correspondent: a relationship shown in his intense and abundant letters to Barbara Bray. The volume also provides critical introductions, chronologies, explanatory notes and profiles of Beckett's main correspondents.

This fourth and final volume, which completes the Cambridge edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, covers the final twenty-four years of what was, as Beckett saw it, a surprisingly long life. During these years he produced many of his finest and most concentrated works for theatre, plays that included Not I, Ohio Impromptu, and Catastrophe; for television he wrote Eh Joe and Ghost Trio; while in prose, he produced the late 'trilogy' that comprises Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho. In 1969, Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the letters from this period show him struggling to cope with the pressures created by his ever-growing international fame. The letters reveal how, later, he turned his mind to his legacy, as seen through his interactions with biographers and archivists. This volume also provides chronologies, explanatory notes, translations, and profiles of Beckett's chief correspondents.