Category Personalities

          Samuel Beckett was a renowned Irish author, critic, playwright, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He wrote in both French and English. He was born on a Good Friday on 13th April 1906, in Ireland.

          In 1928, Samuel Beckett moved to Paris, and the city quickly won his heart. During World War II, Beckett was living in Paris. He joined the underground movement, and fought for the resistance until 1942. He was forced to flee with his French-born wife to the unoccupied zone. In 1945, after the liberation, he began his most prolific period as a writer.

          He authored ‘Eleutheria’, ‘Waiting for Godot’, ‘Endgame’, the novels ‘Molloy’, ‘Malone Dies’, ‘The Unnameable’, and ‘Mercier and Camier’, two books of short stories, and a book of criticism. His experiences during World War II – insecurity, exile, hunger – came to shape his writing.

          In his most famous work, ‘Waiting for Godot’, he examines the most basic foundations of our lives with strikingly dark humour. Beckett died on 22nd December, 1989.

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          The Nobel Prize in Literature 1958 was awarded to Boris Pasternak for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the Great Russian epic tradition.

          Boris Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10th February, 1890. His father was an artist and professor, and his mother was a concert pianist.

          Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, an event which both humiliated and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. His novel ‘Doctor Zhivago’ helped him win the Nobel Prize. He accepted the prize initially, but he was forced by the authorities of his country to decline the prize. Later,   his descendants were to accept it in his name in 1988.

          His most important works are ‘Twin in the Clouds’, ‘Over the Barriers’, ‘On Early Trains’, ‘Poems’, ‘Themes and Variations’, ‘Safe Conduct’, ‘Second Birth’, and ‘Doctor Zhivago’. Pasternak’s translations of stage plays by Goethe, Schiller, Calderon de la Barca and Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences.

          Outside Russia, Pasternak is best known as the author of ‘Doctor Zhivago’.

          Boris Pasternak died on 30th May, 1960.

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          Albert Camus was a French-Algerian playwright, novelist, and Nobel laureate. Camus was a representative of non-metropolitan French literature.

          Camus was born on 7th November 1913, in French Algeria. He studied at the University of Algiers.

          While living in occupied France during World War II, he became active in the Resistance movement. He was a very active theatre producer and playwright.

          By mid-century, he became a renowned writer, and had a worldwide readership. His three most important novels are ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Plague’, and ‘The Fall’. He authored two book-length philosophical essays ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, and ‘The Rebel’, which received much appreciation too. He was often credited as being a proponent of existentialism.

          He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 for his literary production, which illuminates the problems of the human conscience. Camus died on 4th January 1960, in a car accident.

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            William Faulkner was a major American writer of the twentieth century. His imaginative power, and the psychological depth of his works, ranks him as one of America’s greatest novelists. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to modern American literature.

            He joined the Canadian, and later, the British, Royal Air Force during the First World War. During the early 1920s, Faulkner wrote poetry and fiction. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories.

            Though Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally, he was relatively unknown until he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

            William Faulkner received his Nobel Prize one year later, in 1950. Faulkner donated his Nobel winnings, to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers, eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Faulkner died of heart attack on 6th July 1962, at the age of 64.

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          As a philosopher, mathematician, educator, social critic and political activist, Bertrand Russell authored over 70 books and thousands of essays and letters. Bertrand Russell was born at Trellech on 18th May 1872 in the United Kingdom.

          Russell was a prominent anti-war activist and he championed anti-imperialism. He went to prison for his pacifism during World War I. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

          Born into the British aristocracy, and educated at Cambridge University, Russell gave away much of his inherited wealth. Instead of being sent to school in childhood, he was taught by governesses and tutors. In 1890 he went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge.

          His first books were ‘German Social Democracy’, ‘An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry’, and ‘A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz’.

          He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He was active as a politician and social critic until his death. Bertrand Russell died on 2nd February, 1970.

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          T.S. Eliot, American-English author, was one of the most significant English poets of the twentieth century.

          He was born in Missouri on 26th September 1888. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25. In 1927, at the age of 39, he became a British citizen, renouncing his American citizenship.

          Eliot’s writing style dealt with the bad feelings that World War I had created in European and American societies. It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in ‘Poetry’ in 1915.

          Some of his other major works are ‘The Wasteland’, ‘The Hollow Men’, ‘Ash Wednesday’, and ‘Four Quartets’. He was also known for his seven plays, particularly ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, and ‘The Cocktail Party’. Among all his works, Eliot considered ‘Four Quartets’, his best. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948 for his outstanding contribution to poetry”. He died in London on 4th January 1965.

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