Samuel Beckett was perhaps the most unconventional playwright of the twentieth century. His plays broke all the rules by dispensing with traditional concepts of plot, scene, and character, concentrating instead on the experience of the drama itself. An intensely private man, Beckett's work was profoundly influenced by his relationship with his mother and what he called her ""savage loving,"" and by the tensions and hypocrisies of his divided country. In his work, he presents us with our own humanity; the hopelessness and the solitude, the bizarre tragicomedy of life itself.

Many of the items collected in this volume have never been published, among them the transcription of a 1938 letter from James Joyce to Beckett's brother Frank, assuring that Beckett was recovering under the Joyce family's care after an unprovoked stabbing by a Paris pimp. Photos from many of Beckett's play productions, his childhood home and family in Dublin, and manuscript pages complement an incisive biography by Beckett scholar Gerry Dukes, providing a unique introduction to the life and work of one of drama's great masters.