Irish-born, Paris-dwelling novelist and playwright whose late work reduced literature to a voice muttering in the dark — and in doing so produced some of the most unforgettable writing of the 20th century. Beckett began as a disciple and sometime secretary of Joyce in 1930s Paris, wrote an early critical book on Proust (1931), and produced in English a fiction (Murphy, 1938; Watt, written during the war) that was clever, mandarin, and not quite his own.
The breakthrough came after the war, in French: the trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable (1951–53), written in a language not his first, each book stripping away more — setting, character, plot, finally the stability of the narrating voice itself — until in The Unnamable only the voice remains, unable to stop, unable to go on. Waiting for Godot (En attendant Godot, 1953), the play in which nothing happens, twice, made him world-famous and founded what Martin Esslin would call the Theatre of the Absurd. Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days (1961), and the ever-shorter late plays and prose pieces (Not I, Rockaby, Company, Worstward Ho — "Fail again. Fail better.") pushed the reduction further.
Beckett's stance was not despair but a kind of stripped-down fidelity: the work must go on, even when nothing can be said, because the voice will not stop. He fought with the French Resistance, hid in the Vaucluse, refused most of the Nobel ceremony in 1969, and for decades supervised every production of his plays with absolute precision. He is the last unignorable modernist.