While in Paris, Beckett met the esteemed Irish author James Joyce. After graduating, he taught briefly at Campbell College in Belfast before becoming a lecturer at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Zachary Davis: Beckett then enrolled in Trinity College Dublin, where he studied modern literature and philosophy. He was a very good athlete, particularly at cricket, he was excellent at cricket, but he was generally very athletic and was interested in sports and played sports. So he was sent as a boarder away from his family home. It was in Enniskillen, which is about 100 miles north, northwest of Dublin. Peter Connor: He was educated at Portora Royal School, which was also for Protestants, Ireland was really very segregated at the time, and that school was in the northern part of Ireland. Zachary Davis: Growing up Protestant in heavily Catholic Dublin instilled a sense of isolation in Beckett that would remain with him throughout his life. So he was part of the prosperous Protestant and therefore minority community of Ireland at the time. Peter Connor: They had a large tudor style family home in an exclusive suburb of Dublin called Foxrock.

Samuel Beckett was born to a wealthy family in Dublin, Ireland in 1906. For this episode, I sat down with professor Peter Connor to discuss Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. I mean, he's relentless, the second act is worse than the first. It's not a literature of negation at all. Peter Connor: There's an enormous amount of affirmation in Beckett. It’s been interpreted in countless ways, with no definitive confirmation from Beckett one way or another. Zachary Davis: Since the premier, people have been trying to figure out what this play means. My name is Peter Connor, I teach French and comparative literature at Barnard College in New York. And then there were quickly requests for productions elsewhere, leading him to a fame that he never felt comfortable with, he remained a very private individual. Peter Connor: He nonetheless garnered a couple of good early reviews and very quickly became a subject of conversation in Paris such that everybody wanted to go to see En attendant Godot at the time. Some people reportedly stormed out of the premier, but overall it was well received. In addition, it was his first play produced on stage. Also, it was written in French, which was not Beckett’s native language. For one, it is a play where nothing seems to happen. Zachary Davis: Its success was surprising, given its many unusual qualities. It was really almost immediately successful. Peter Connor: Godot was the play that made Beckett without question. Zachary Davis: In Paris in 1953, one of the strangest and most popular plays of the 20th century premiered, Waiting for Godot, written by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett.

Waiting for godot published