She had just finished her doctoral studies at Columbia. Bair was not the obvious candidate for the job. I recall being amazed when the biography appeared in 1978 that the famously reclusive Beckett would have let anyone chronicle his life. Samuel Beckett: A Biography Hardcover Jby Deirdre Bair (Author) 9 ratings See all formats and editions Hardcover 28.78 12 Used from 25.83 Paperback 5.85 18 Used from 5.

That she managed to get him to agree to her writing the book was itself rather stunning.

But this was especially true for Bair, who came to write her first biography without any credentials that would obviously have impressed Beckett, her subject. These giants of 20th-century literature would present major challenges for any biographer, given their difficult personalities. Bair talks frankly about how her books were written and what she had to endure to finish them, focusing on two early works, well-known lives of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir. I know a good bit about this, having written several biographies myself, and I don’t envy Deirdre Bair, author of this absorbing memoir of her life as a biographer, which is also a convenient primer for would-be biographers. It’s as if biographies somehow get written by themselves, without the countless hours of slogging and inspired guesswork that go into even the least of them. For all of this, biographers – as opposed to novelists or writers of popular nonfiction in other categories – often remain in the shadows.

Readers gobble biographies up like candy and bookstores would feel impoverished without a fresh stack of them on display each season. Biography remains the least theorised of the major genres.

Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair