Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett (/ˈbɛkɪt/; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd."

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Biography

Early life and education

The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays.

Sam Beckett

Dr. Samuel "Sam" Beckett is a fictional character and the protagonist on the science fiction television series Quantum Leap, played by Scott Bakula.

Initially, the audience knows very little about Sam, much as Sam knows little about himself due to holes in his memory dubbed the "Swiss cheese effect."

Backstory

Sam Beckett was born at 12:30 pm EST on August 8, 1953, in Elk Ridge, Indiana to dairy farmer John Samuel Beckett and his wife Thelma Louise Beckett. As a child, he had two cats, named Donner and Blitzen, but never had a dog. Sam was a child prodigy, learning to read at age 2 and do advanced calculus in his head at age 5. By the time he was 10, he could beat a computer at chess. Sam also played piano in a concert at Carnegie Hall when he was 19, plays guitar, is a good dancer, sings tenor, and his favorite song is John Lennon's "Imagine".

Sam has a photographic memory, an IQ of 267, likes dry or light beer, and microwave popcorn. Sam also knows several kinds of martial arts and has been afraid of heights since he was 9 years old. In his teen years, Sam's family was dealt a hard blow when his older brother, Tom, was killed in Vietnam on April 8, 1970, but Sam leaps into his brother's unit and saves him on that day. Tom (Thomas Andrew Beckett) was a good athlete, an All-State basketball player, an Annapolis graduate, is a Navy SEAL Commander, and has a wife named Mary. Sam has one sister named Katie (Katherine Elizabeth Beckett), born during a flood in 1957, whose first husband was an abusive alcoholic named Chuck. They divorced and she is now married to Navy officer Lt. Jim Bonnick. They have lived in Hawaii with Thelma Beckett since 1974.