Theatre of the Absurd and the American Novel

Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), an Irish playwright and novelist who wrote in both English and French and spent most of his adult life in Paris, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 "for his writing, which — in new forms for the novel and drama — in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." Beckett is the central figure of what the critic Martin Esslin, in his 1961 study The Theatre of the Absurd, named as a movement, grouping Beckett with playwrights such as Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet whose work abandoned conventional plot, logical dialogue, and coherent characterization to dramatize a universe stripped of inherent meaning or purpose, echoing in theatrical form the philosophical concerns Camus had articulated in prose.