Beckett Reading from His Works

Playwright, poet, and novelist Samuel Beckett shied away from recording devices like a rabbit hides from red-tailed hawks, but the following reading—one of very few in existence—captures him narrating a poem and a portion of one of his works: the novel Watt. Lawrence Harvey, a professor of comparative literature, met with Beckett in Paris several times and made this recording during one of his visits in 1965. Beckett won the Nobel prize for Literature in 1969 after being judged “unsuitable for the award” in 1968 by some of the committee members.