Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett | National Humanities Center

Work of the Fellows: Biographies

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

By James Knowlson (NHC Fellow, 2002–03)

Authors; Irish History; Irish Literature; Samuel Beckett

New York: Grove Press, 2004

From the publisher’s description:

Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize–winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett’s chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly re-creates Beckett’s life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989, revealing the real man behind the literary giant. Scrupulously researched and filled with previously unknown information garnered from interviews with the author and his friends, family, and contemporaries, Knowlson’s unparalleled work is the definitive Beckett biography of our time.

Awards and Prizes
George Freedley Memorial Award (1997)
Subjects
History / Literature / Authors / Irish History / Irish Literature / Samuel Beckett /

Knowlson, James (NHC Fellow, 2002–03). Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove Press, 2004.