Samuel Beckett

A first-edition collection of the works of Samuel Beckett.

• Sold as a set of 16 volumes.
• Samuel Beckett (Irish).
• New York: Grove Press, 1970.
• Octavo.
• Part of a limited edition of 200 numbered copies.
• Includes a signed edition of Waiting for Godot.
• Bound in publisher's black cloth, spine and front cover stamped and lettered in gold, with some interesting marginalia to the first volume.

As a dramatist, and here as an exponent of Theatre of the Absurd, as well as a novelist, Beckett was probably one of the most original and individual postwar writers to emerge in English, and possibly in French. Although he had written before, it was in 1945, when he finally settled in France, that one of his most creative and fruitful periods followed. Influenced by French existentialist philosophy, he developed a highly distinctive voice which concentrated on the essential aspects of human existence, experience and condition, which he particularly expressed in his plays such as Waiting for Godot or Krapp's Last Tape. Both Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard were influenced by Beckett who received the Nobel Prize in 1969.