James knowlson biography

Knowlson James: James Knowlson is a professor emeritus of French at the University of Reading, England, and is Founder of the Beckett International Foundation.
Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly recreates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb.
Professor James Knowlson is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Reading where he founded the Beckett Archive (now the Beckett International.

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Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

Damned to Fame is the brilliant and insightful portrait of Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett, mysterious and reclusive master of twentieth-century literature. Professor James Knowlson, Beckett's chosen biographer and a leading authority on Beckett, vividly re-creates Beckett's life from his birth in a rural suburb of Dublin in 1906 to his death in Paris in 1989, revealing the real man behind the literary giant. Scrupulously researched and filled with previously unknown information garnered from interviews with the author and his friends, family, and contemporaries, Knowlson's unparalleled work is the definitive Beckett biography of our time.

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DAMNED TO FAME
The Life of Samuel Beckett.
By James Knowlson.
Illustrated. 800 pp. New York:
Simon & Schuster. $35.

IN 1986 a leading scholar of Samuel Beckett's writing said, ''I have found biography to be of little help in understanding the works of Samuel Beckett.'' Three years later Beckett asked this doubter, James Knowlson, to write his biography.

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''Damned to Fame'' is not the first life of Beckett, of course. Notably, there was Deirdre Bair's 1978 biography, which drew on many letters she had discovered from Beckett to his friend Tom MacGreevy. They dispel the notion of Beckett as a philosophical recluse and show him as a man whose troubles shaped his writing. Mr. Knowlson has had full access to the MacGreevy letters, unlike Ms. Bair, and to six notebooks reporting Beckett's mind-altering trip through Germany in 1936-37. He added dozens of other sources. Beckett died six months after Mr. Knowlson began his work (he retired as a professor of French at the University of Reading in England to take

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Knowlson, James & Elizabeth – Archive and Library

Professor James Knowlson is Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Reading where he founded the Beckett Archive (now the Beckett International Foundation). He was a friend of Samuel Beckett for twenty years and is his authorised biographer, publishing Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckettwith Bloomsbury in 1996. He has written or edited many other books and essays on Beckett and modern drama, including most recently Images of Beckett with theatre photographer John Haynes.

Dr Elizabeth Knowlson lectured in French at the University of Glasgow from 1961 to 1969. After having three children, she resumed her university career as an administrator at the Centre for Applied Language Studies in the University of Reading, before leaving her post to assist her husband with his biography of Beckett and his later books and essays.

(Source for Elizabeth Knowlson information: Bloomsbury.com. Elizabeth Knowlson. [online])

Archive Collection

Reference: JEK Date: 1906