Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906. After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in the late twenties, he went to Paris to join the staff of the Ecole Normale Superieure. He very soon made the acquaintance of James Joyce and his first published work was an essay on Joyce's Work in Progress (later Finnegans Wake). This was soon followed by an award-winning long poem, Whoroscope, and a critical monograph titled Proust. He briefly held a lectureship in French at Trinity College, but resigned from the post when he realized he was unsuited to teaching. From the spring of 1946 he elected to use French as his language of literary composition and, over the next five years, wrote two plays, four novels, poetry, criticism and four novellas in that language. With the production of En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) in 1953, Beckett was finally recognized as a great artist. He died in Paris in December 1989 and is buried in Montparnasse.