“Great Carthage waged three wars. It was still powerful after the first, habitable still after the second. Gone without trace after the third.” With this 1951 quotation, Bertolt Brecht encapsulates a fate that seemed all too plausible in the mid-20th century—and which has again become disturbingly relevant today. It is precisely this vision of annihilation that Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot confronts. Opening on a bare stage—“A country road. A tree. Evening”—the play asks what is left of humanity when a third war is unleashed.

To fathom this, one must understand the man who wrote it. Born in 1906 into an upper-middle-class, Protestant, and Anglo-Irish family, Samuel Beckett would go on to become one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Beckett first went to Paris in 1928 as an English lecturer, where he was introduced to the city’s avant-garde circles by his fellow Dubliner James Joyce—an encounter that would profoundly influence his future writing.

After years of moving between Ireland, London, Germany, and France, he settled permanently in Paris in 1937, where he met his future wife, Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. When the Second World War broke out, he decided to stay. In his words, he preferred “France at war to Ireland at peace.” Following the Nazi invasion, he joined the French Resistance, working clandestinely as a courier and interpreter. He narrowly escaped the Gestapo on several occasions. When members of his resistance network were arrested, Beckett and Suzanne were forced to flee to the village of Roussillon in the unoccupied zone in the South of France, where he continued to support the fight against fascism. For his dangerous work against the Nazis, the writer was later awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.