Samuel Beckett

Beckett moved to Paris in his twenties and worked as James Joyce's secretary, running errands and taking dictation for the aging master of Finnegans Wake. In 1938 a stranger stabbed him in the street, nearly fatally; during the war he joined the French Resistance as a courier, then fled into hiding in rural Roussillon after his cell was betrayed to the Gestapo.

After the war he wrote in a sudden, furious burst (the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, plus the play Waiting for Godot), composing first in French, a language chosen for its lack of habit, then translating his own work back into English. Godot's 1953 Paris premiere made him famous almost against his will; he accepted the 1969 Nobel Prize but sent a publisher to collect it. He died in Paris in 1989, months after his wife Suzanne.