Beckett Remembering: Remembering Beckett

‘A volume that admirers will seize on hungrily for its details, and for the many photographs ... Refreshing and enlightening. I closed the book eager to go back to the masterworks' - Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times‘These humanising glimpses are a treat for the Beckett fan' - Independent‘Magnificently enriched by a series of interviews spread over a decade between Professor James Knowlson and Beckett' - Glasgow HeraldSamuel Beckett, one of the towering figures of twentieth-century literature, was also famously reclusive. In these intimate interviews conducted by his biographer, James Knowlson, Beckett and his family, friends and contemporaries reveal more of the writer's human side than ever before. Beckett himself talks of his early youth, his friendship with James Joyce and his Resistance work in Paris during the Second World War. Some of his closest friends remember him both as a schoolboy and struggling young writer, while his students at Trinity College, Dublin give their opinions of him as a lecturer. Esteemed actors, writers and directors, including Billie Whitelaw, Edward Albee and J. M. Coetzee, remember Beckett at the time of his international success. The result is a vivid collection of first-hand experiences, a tribute to a remarkable novelist, poet and dramatist.

‘A volume that admirers will seize on hungrily for its details, and for the many photographs ... Refreshing and enlightening. I closed the book eager to go back to the masterworks', ‘These humanising glimpses are a treat for the Beckett fan ... The Knowlsons have assembled, in this scholarly but charming book, a mosaic of epiphanies ... while going some way to demystify the great Unknowable', ‘Beckett is surpassingly the modern author whose life rewards such devotion', ‘Magnificently enriched by a series of interviews spread over a decade between Professor James Knowlson and Beckett'

James Knowlson is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Reading where he founded the Beckett Archive (now the Beckett International Foundation). He was a friend of Samuel Beckett for twenty years and is his authorised biographer, publishing Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett with Bloomsbury in 1996. Dr Elizabeth Knowlson lectured in French at the University of Glasgow from 1961 to 1969. After having three children, she resumed her university career as an administrator at the Centre for Applied Language Studies in the University of Reading, before leaving her post to assist her husband with his biography of Beckett and his later books and essays.