Samuel Beckett and Waiting for GodotAs much as any body of writing of this century, the works of Samuel Beckett reflect an unfailing, even obsessive, flirtation with universal emptiness . His literary and dramatic tales of skirmishes without nothing feature human beings (generally, beings, at least, more or less human and intact beings) situated in paradoxical and incredibly absurd circumstances. Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the comfortable Dublin suburb of Foxrock in 1906 on the 13th, either April, which was Good Friday that year, or May, he and his birth certificate were always at odds on this point. He was the second son of a fairly well-off bourgeois Protestant couple: his father was an entrepreneur and his mother a former nurse. Beckett's education was conventional. When he was thirteen, his parents sent him to Portora Royal boarding school in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. He studied the classics and was also very successful at cricket, rugby and swimming. In 1923 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied modern languages. He was honored for his high academic achievements after receiving his bachelor's degree in December 1927. In 1928 he began a literary career as a teacher and critic. He taught French for two terms at Campbell College, Belfast, and later that year began a two-year exchange at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In Paris, he met his future mentor, James Joyce, and he began writing and publishing criticism and poetry. He returned to Dublin, where, between 1930 and 1932, he obtained his master's degree and lectured in French at Trinity College. Over the next few years he wrote and...... middle of paper......, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: a biography. New York: Summit, 1990. Beckett Festival: Dublin October 1-20. Official program book of the Beckett Festival, in conjunction with the 1991 Dublin Theater Festival. Dublin: Beckett Festival, 1991. Beckett, Samuel. The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber and Faber, 1986. Beckett, Samuel. “Three Dialogues”, transition 49, 5 (December 1949), pp. 97-103. In Samuel Beckett, ACollection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (New York: Prentice Hall, 1965), 16-22; also in Ruby Cohn, Disjecta (New York, 1984), 138-45.Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1955. Esslin, Martin. The Theater of the Absurd. New York: Anchor, 1969. Kennedy, Andrew K. Samuel Beckett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Lyon, Charles R. Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1983.