Beckett biography knowlsons auto

James Knowlson's 'Damned to Fame' is the biography of the Nobel Prize-Winning novelist, playwright, poet and translator, Samuel Beckett, and an impressive and.
Jim Knowlson, who was a personal friend of Samuel Beckett for 19 years, and is his authorised biographer.
Samuel Beckett's authorised biographer, Emeritus Professor James Knowlson, has donated more than seven hours of taped conversations with the.

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Manuscripts, notebooks and papers relating to world-famous novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett go on display at the University library today to mark its official re-opening. Beckett’s biographer Professor James (Jim) Knowlson tells the story of how the University of Reading became home to the biggest collection of Beckett materials in the world.

In 1969, Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize for Literature – ‘for his writing, which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’.

The following year, Dr Jim Knowlson moved to a Lectureship at Reading from the University of Glasgow, where he had been teaching 18th century French Literature and Thought, and Modern Drama.

Jim had what he now describes as a ‘crazy idea’ – to put on an exhibition dedicated to the new Nobel Laureate’s work. There was only one problem: at that time, the University only had six of Beckett’s books.

Youthful enthusiasm

Not to be thwarted by having very little to exhibit, Jim decided that he would go ahead. “

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“In the summer of 1935, Samuel Beckett and his widowed mother, May, took a three-week road trip together in England. It is not clear whose idea it was, but Beckett, who was living in an almost destitute state in London at the time, seems to have gone along with the plan willingly enough. With his mother paying all expenses, he hired a small car and took her on what he called a “lightning tour” of English market towns and cathedral cities including St Albans, Canterbury, Winchester, Bath and Wells. They covered hundreds of miles, driving as far as the West Country and spending almost three weeks together.

Beckett described their trip together in letters to his friend Tom MacGreevy, later the director of the National Gallery of Ireland. After they reached the West Country, he told MacGreevy, their hired car struggled with the “demented gradients, 1 in 4 a commonplace” around hilly Porlock and Lynton. They decided not to spend a night in the seaside resort of Minehead: one look at it was enough. Instead, they spent almost a week in a comfortable hotel in Lynmouth, close to whe

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Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, ed. by James & Elizabeth Knowlson

Pathologically shy, ill-equipped for social niceties, he wasn't good at interaction. When he played cricket for Trinity College, Dublin, his team "were a happy band, drinking and whoring and so on between matches, and I'd go off alone and sit in the church". The third volume of his great trilogy of novels was The Unnameable; to students, publishers, readers and theatrical associates, its author remained The Unknowable.

In consequence, to discover tiny details about Beckett's everyday life has always been an occasion of excitement. I remember the frisson of hearing in 1977 from the Dublin professor JCC Mays, who met him in Paris, that he smoked small cigars and had paintings in his flat by Jasper Johns and Avigdor Arikha. I was thrilled to learn, from Billie Whitelaw, that his favourite dish was liver and onions.

It was a red-letter day in 1996 when James Knowlson, founder of the Beckett Archive (now the Beckett International Foundation) at Reading University, published Damned to Fame, the authorised biog