Waiting for Godot

London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956. First Edition of "The Most Significant English-language play of the 20th Century

BECKETT, Samuel. Waiting for Godot a tragicomedy in two acts... London: Faber and Faber Limited, [1956].

First edition, second impression (without tipped-in publisher's note).

Octavo (8 x 4 7/8 inches; 203 x 124 mm.). [1-8], 9-94 pp.

Publisher's yellow cloth, spine lettered in red, typical toning and light foxing to endpapers. Pictorial dust jacket, slightly chipped at extremities. A near fine copy in a very good dust jacket.

Waiting for Godot is a play by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett that follows two characters, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), as they engage in conversations and encounters while waiting for the elusive Godot, who never appears. The play is an adaptation of Beckett's original French work, En attendant Godot, and carries the English subtitle "a tragicomedy in two acts."

Beckett wrote the original French text between October 9, 1948, and January 29, 1949. It premiered on January 5, 1953, at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris under the direction of Roger Blin. The English-language production debuted in London in 1955.

In a 1998-99 poll conducted by the British Royal National Theatre, it was voted "the most significant English-language play of the 20th century.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-1989) was an Irish-born writer of novels, plays, short stories and poems. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. Beckett is best remembered for his 1953 play Waiting for Godot, and he is considered to be one of the last modernist writers, as well as a key figure in what Martin Esslin called, the "Theatre of the Absurd