The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett: All That Fall, Act Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Cascando, Eh Joe, Footfall, Rockaby and others

by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, has produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the shorter play. This complete and definitive collection of twenty-five plays and "playlets" includes Beckett's celebrated Krapp's Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptiation of Robert Pinget's The Old Tune, and the more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams.

"Beckett reduces life, perception, and writing to barest minimums: a few dimly seen, struggling torsos; a hopeless intelligence compulsively seeking to come to terms, in rudimentary yet endlessly varied language, with the human condition they represent. Within these extraordinary limitations, Beckett's verbal ability nonetheless generates great intensity." - Library Journal

"Beckett stalks after men on their way out... His plays (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) and novels (Molloy, Murphy) are metaphors for modern man's spiritual bafflement... In spite of the hits of movement... all is really paralytic stasis - except for the voices, the indomitable voices." - Time

Genres: Plays, Drama, Theatre, Fiction, Classics, Irish Literature, 20th Century

316 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Novels of Samuel Barclay Beckett, Irish writer, include Murphy in 1938 and Malone Dies in 1951; a wider audience know his absurdist plays, such as Waiting for Godot in 1952 and Krapp's Last Tape in 1959, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1969 for literature.

Samuel Barclay Beckett, an avant-garde theater director and poet, lived in France for most of his adult life. He used English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black gallows humor.

People regard most influence of Samuel Barclay Beckett of the 20th century. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce strongly influenced him, whom people consider as one modernist. People sometimes consider him as an inspiration to many later first postmodernists. He is one of the key in what Martin Esslin called the "theater of the absurd". His later career worked with increasing minimalism.

People awarded Samuel Barclay Beckett "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".

In 1984, people elected Samuel Barclay Bennett as Saoi of Aosdána.