Samuel Beckett, Author of ‘Godot’ and Winner of Nobel, Is Dead at 83

Samuel Beckett, whose “Waiting For Godot” and other tragicomic plays of brooding despair revolutionized 20th-Century theater, died in a Paris nursing home at the age of 83 and was buried today in strict secrecy, four days after his death.

Editions de Minuit, the French publishing house that turned the spotlight on Beckett after printing “Waiting for Godot,” said the death Friday of the Dublin-born dramatist had been kept quiet to respect his lifelong desire for privacy.

“It was his wish,” said the daughter of Jerome Lindon. Lindon published the enigmatic play in 1952, a year after agreeing to print one of Beckett’s first novels, “Molloy,” a difficult text turned down by established publishers.

The Nobel Prize-winning author was buried in Montparnasse cemetery beside his wife, Suzanne, who died last July.

A pot of yellow flowers, a plant and a single candle stood on the gravestone after the funeral, a simple ceremony attended by a score of close friends, with no priest and no speeches.

The tall, gaunt writer never gave press interviews and refused to travel to Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969.

But the reclusive Irishman was a familiar figure in some of Paris’ oldest literary cafes, especially the Closeries des Lilas, not far from his Montparnasse apartment and once a favorite haunt of figures such as Ernest Hemingway and V. I. Lenin.

Beckett moved to France in 1937 after giving up a job as a university lecturer in Ireland and roaming Europe in a style reminiscent of the hobos who are featured in his later work.

In 1938, he was stabbed by a man asking for money and rushed to a hospital by a young woman, a stranger who became his wife.

Although Beckett was influenced by his friend and fellow-countryman James Joyce, his sparse writing was the exact opposite. His tragicomic plays, colored with a brooding pessimism, cast aside conventional plot, time and characters.

“At the end of my work, there is nothing but dust,” he once said. British theater critic Martin Esslin quoted him as saying: “I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.”

Lindon, who has published 22 of Beckett’s works, said in a recent interview that he took on the then obscure writer in the early 1950s because “I knew immediately he was one of the greatest writers of our time.”

His first encounter with Beckett’s work was “one of the great moments of my life,” he said.

Beckett wrote with equal ease in French or English, translating his own texts from one language to the other.

“Waiting for Godot,” the story of two tramps who wait for Godot, who never comes, has been translated into several dozen languages and influenced a generation of playwrights, including Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Edward Albee.

At a nursing home where Beckett lived for most of the last 18 months, a spokeswoman said the writer never mentioned his wife’s death. “It’s not that he didn’t care, but he never mentioned it,” she said.