Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

_______________ ''A triumph of scholarship and sympathy... one of the great post-war biographies'' - Independent ''A landmark in scholarly criticism... Knowlson is the world''s largest Beckett scholar. His life is right up there with George Painter''s Proust and Richard Ellmann''s Joyce in sensitivity and fascination'' - Daily Telegraph ''It is hard to imagine a fuller portrait of the man who gave our age some of the myths by which it lives'' - Evening Standard _______________ SHORTLISTED FOR THE WHITBREAD PRIZE _______________ Samuel Beckett''s long-standing friend, James Knowlson, recreates Beckett''s youth in Ireland, his studies at Trinity College, Dublin in the early 1920s and from there to the Continent, where he plunged into the multicultural literary society of late-1920s Paris. The biography throws new light on Beckett''s