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.