Previously unpublished material including detailed accounts of Beckett's Resistance work and full notes of his university lectures on Racine Includes many previously unpublished and unseen photographs of Beckett and his circle

'A volume that admirers will seize on hungrily for its details, and for the many photographs ... Refreshing and enlightening. I closed the book eager to go back to the masterworks' Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times 'These humanising glimpses are a treat for the Beckett fan ... The Knowlsons have assembled, in this scholarly but charming book, a mosaic of epiphanies ... while going some way to demystify the great Unknowable' Independent 'Beckett is surpassingly the modern author whose life rewards such devotion' Evening Standard 'Magnificently enriched by a series of interviews spread over a decade between Professor James Knowlson and Beckett' Glasgow Herald

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 Beckett with Bloomsbury in 1996. 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.