Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot

New York

Grove Press

1954

Born a generation after James Joyce and a deep admirer of his work, Samuel Beckett like Joyce found himself alienated from Irish nationalism and the censorship of his first stories. Like Joyce, too, Beckett moved to Paris and became enmeshed in its modernism. Yet on a trip back to Ireland he realized “that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more.… I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.” He turned to theater. Seamus Heaney describes Beckett’s “transformative way with language, his mixture of word-play and merciless humor.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in Waiting for Godot, his two-act tragicomedy that premiered in Paris in 1953 and Ireland in 1955. Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.