The watt ( /ˈwɒt/ WOT; symbol: W) is a derived unit of power in the International System of Units (SI), named after the Scottish engineer James Watt (1736–1819). The unit, defined as one joule per second, measures the rate of energy conversion or transfer.

Definition[link]

• One watt is the rate at which work is done when an object's velocity is held constant at one meter per second against constant opposing force of one newton.

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \mathrm{W = \frac{J}{s} = \frac{N\cdot m}{s} = \frac{kg\cdot m^2}{s^3}}

• In terms of electromagnetism, one watt is the rate at which work is done when one ampere (A) of current flows through an electrical potential difference of one volt (V).

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \mathrm{W = V \cdot A}

Two additional unit conversions for watt can be found using the above equation and Ohm's Law.

Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \mathrm{W = \frac{V^2}{\Omega} = A^2\cdot\Omega}

Where ohm (Failed to parse (Missing texvc executable; please see math/README to configure.): \Omega

) is the SI derived unit of electrical resistance.

Examples[link]

• A person having a mass of 100 kilograms who climbs a 3 meter high ladder in 5 seconds is doing work at a rate of about 600 watts. Mass times acceleration due to gravity times height divided by the time it takes to lift the object to the given height gives the rate of doing work or power.^{[notes 1]}
• A laborer over the course of an 8-hour day can sustain an average output of about 75 watts; higher power levels can be achieved for short intervals and by athletes.^[1]

• A medium-sized passenger automobile engine is rated at 50 to 150 kilowatts^[2] – while cruising it will typically yield half that amount.
• A typical household incandescent light bulb has a power rating of 25 to 100 watts; fluorescent lamps typically consume 5 to 30 watts to produce a similar amount of light.

• A typical coal power station produces around 600 - 700 megawatts. A typical unit in a nuclear power plant has an electrical power output of 900 - 1300 MW.

Origin and adoption as an SI unit[link]

The watt is named after the Scottish scientist James Watt for his contributions to the development of the steam engine. The unit was recognized by the Second Congress of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1882. The 11th General Conference on Weights and Measures in 1960 adopted it for the measurement of power into the International System of Units (SI).

Multiples[link]

For additional examples of magnitude for multiples and submultiples of the watt, see Orders of magnitude (power)

Femtowatt[link]

The femtowatt is equal to one quadrillionth (10⁻¹⁵) of a watt. Technologically important powers that are measured in femtowatts are typically found in reference(s) to radio and radar receivers. For example, meaningful FM tuner performance figures for sensitivity, quieting and signal-to-noise require that the RF energy applied to the antenna input be specified. These input levels are often stated in dBf (decibels referenced to 1 femtowatt). This is 0.2739 microvolt across a 75 ohm load or 0.5477 microvolt across a 300 ohm load; the specification takes into account the RF input impedance of the tuner.

Picowatt[link]

The picowatt is equal to one trillionth (10⁻¹²) of a watt. Technologically important powers that are measured in picowatts are typically used in reference to radio and radar receivers, acoustics and also in the science of radio astronomy.

Nanowatt[link]

The nanowatt is equal to one billionth (10⁻⁹) of a watt. A surface area of one square meter on Earth receives one nanowatt of power from a single star of apparent magnitude +3.5. Important powers that are measured in nanowatts are also typically used in reference to radio and radar receivers.

Microwatt[link]

The microwatt is equal to one millionth (10⁻⁶) of a watt. Important powers that are measured in microwatts are typically stated in medical instrumentation systems such as the EEG and the EKG, in a wide variety of scientific and engineering instruments and also in reference to radio and radar receivers. Compact solar cells for devices such as calculators and watches are typically measured in microwatts.^[3]

Milliwatt[link]

The milliwatt is equal to one thousandth (10⁻³) of a watt. A typical laser pointer outputs about five milliwatts of light power, whereas a typical hearing aid for people consumes less than one milliwatt.^[4]

Kilowatt[link]

The kilowatt is equal to one thousand (10³) watts. This unit is typically used to express the output power of engines and the power consumption of electric motors, tools, machines, and heaters. It is also a common unit used to express the electromagnetic power output of broadcast radio and television transmitters.

One kilowatt of power is approximately equal to 1.34 horsepower. A small electric heater with one heating element can use 1.0 kilowatt, which is equivalent to the power consumption of a household in the United States averaged over the entire year (8900 kW h divided by 365×24 hours).^[5] (UK household consume about half this amount)^[6] Also, kilowatts of light power can be measured in the output pulses of some lasers.

A surface area of one square meter on Earth receives typically one kilowatt of power of sunlight from the sun (on a clear day at mid day).

Megawatt[link]

The megawatt is equal to one million (10⁶) watts. Many events or machines produce or sustain the conversion of energy on this scale, including lightning strikes; large electric motors; large warships such as aircraft carriers, cruisers, and submarines; large server farms or data centers; and some scientific research equipment, such as supercolliders, and also in the output pulses of very large lasers. A large residential or commercial building may consume several megawatts in electric power and heat.

The productive capacity of electrical generators operated by a utility company is often measured in megawatts. A typical wind turbine (or wind energy converter) has a power capacity of 1 to 3 MW. On railways, modern high-powered electric locomotives typically have a peak power output of 5 or 6 MW, although some produce much more. The Eurostar, for example, consumes more than 12 MW, while heavy diesel-electric locomotives typically produce/consume 3 to 5 MW. U.S. nuclear power plants have net summer capacities between about 500 and 1300 MW.^[7]

The earliest citing of the megawatt in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a reference in the 1900 Webster's International Dictionary of English Language. The OED also states that megawatt appeared in a 28 November 1947 article in the journal Science (506:2).

Gigawatt[link]

The gigawatt is equal to one billion (10⁹) watts or 1 gigawatt = 1000 megawatts. This unit is sometimes used for large power plants or power grids. For example, by the end of 2010 power shortages in China's Shanxi province were expected to increase to 5–6 GW^[8] and the installed capacity of wind power in Germany was 25.8 GW.^[9] The largest unit (out of four) of the Belgian Nuclear Plant Doel has a peak output of 1.04 GW.^[10]

Though “gigawatt” is usually pronounced today with a velar "g", the “j” alveopalatal variant is also accepted (see giga-#Pronunciation).^[11][12]

Terawatt[link]

The terawatt is equal to one trillion (10¹²) watts. The total power used by humans worldwide (about 16 TW in 2006) is commonly measured in this unit. The most powerful lasers from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s produced power in terawatts, but only for nanosecond time frames. The average strike of lightning peaks at 1 terawatt, but these strokes only last for 30 microseconds. The total power output of the first stage of the Apollo Saturn V moon rocket was 17 terawatts.

Petawatt[link]

The petawatt is equal to one quadrillion (10¹⁵) watts and can be produced by the current generation of lasers for time-scales on the order of femtoseconds (10⁻¹⁵ s). Based on the average of 1.366 kW/m² of total solar irradiance^[13] the total power of sunlight striking Earth's atmosphere is estimated at 174 PW (cf. Solar Constant).

Electrical and thermal watts[link]

In the electric power industry, megawatt electrical (abbreviation: MW_e^[14] or MWe^[15]) is a term that refers to electric power, while megawatt thermal or thermal megawatt^[16] (abbreviations: MW_t, MW_th, MWt, or MWth) refers to thermal power produced. Other SI prefixes are sometimes used, for example gigawatt electrical (GW_e).^{[notes 2]}

For example, the Embalse nuclear power plant in Argentina uses a fission reactor to generate 2109 MW_t of heat, which creates steam to drive a turbine, which generates 648 MW_e of electricity. The difference is due to the inefficiency of steam-turbine generators and the limitations of the theoretical Carnot Cycle.

Confusion of watts, watt-hours, and watts per hour[link]

The terms power and energy are frequently confused. Power is the rate at which energy is generated or consumed.

For example, when a light bulb with a power rating of 100W is turned on for one hour, the energy used is 100 watt-hours (W•h), 0.1 kilowatt-hour, or 360 kJ. This same amount of energy would light a 40-watt bulb for 2.5 hours, or a 50-watt bulb for 2 hours. A power station would be rated in multiples of watts, but its annual energy sales would be in multiples of watt-hours. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy equivalent to a steady power of 1 kilowatt running for 1 hour, or 3.6 MJ (1000 watts x 3600 seconds (i.e., 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour) = 3600000 Joules = 3.6 MJ).

Terms such as watts per hour are often misused.^[17] Watts per hour properly refers to the change of power per hour. Watts per hour (W/h) might be useful to characterize the ramp-up behavior of power plants. For example, a power plant that reaches a power output of 1 MW from 0 MW in 15 minutes has a ramp-up rate of 4 MW/h. Hydroelectric power plants have a very high ramp-up rate, which makes them particularly useful in peak load and emergency situations.

Major energy production or consumption is often expressed as terawatt-hours for a given period that is often a calendar year or financial year. One terawatt-hour is equal to a sustained power of approximately 114 megawatts for a period of one year.

The watt second is a unit of energy, equal to the joule. One kilowatt-hour is 3,600,000 watt-seconds. The watt-second is used, for example, to rate the energy storage of flash lamps used in photography, although the term joule is normally used rather than watt-second.

See also[link]

Energy portal

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Look up watt in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Nelson, Robert A., "The International System of Units Its History and Use in Science and Industry". Via Satellite, February 2000.
• Online Conversion - Power Conversion

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Reggie Watts
Watts in December 2008
Background information
Birth name	Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts
Born	(1972-03-23) March 23, 1972 (age 40)
Genres	Observational comedy, surreal comedy, electronic music, trip hop, soul
Instruments	Voice, loop sampler, piano, synthesizers
Associated acts	Maktub, Soulive
Website	reggiewatts.com
Notable instruments
Line 6 DL4 delay modeler, Electro Harmonix 2880, iPhone

Reggie Watts (born March 23, 1972) is a Brooklyn-based comedian and musician. His shows are mostly improvised and consist of stream of consciousness stand-up in various shifting personae, mixed with loop pedal-based a cappella compositions. He performs regularly on television, radio, and in live theater. His comic skills come into play in improvisational performance, as well as performance of written music.

Early life (1972–1990)[link]

Born in Germany as Reginald Lucien Frank Roger Watts,^[1][2] Watts is the only child of Christiane and Charles Alphonso Watts; his mother is French and his father is African-American.^[3] His father was an officer in the United States Air Force and the family lived in Germany and Spain before relocating to Great Falls, Montana, where Watts was raised and graduated from Great Falls High School.^[2] Watts also took piano and violin lessons from the age of five until he was 16.^[4]

Seattle (1990–2004)[link]

Watts moved to Seattle at age 18 where he briefly attended the Art Institute of Seattle before eventually studying jazz at Cornish College of the Arts.^[1] He went on to play in a number of Seattle bands of wildly varying styles/genres, including Hit Explosion, Swampdweller, Action Buddy, Chiarrscuro, Clementine, Smell No Taste, Wayne Horvitz 4+1 Ensemble,^[5] Das Rut, Synthclub, Elemental, Eyvand Kang Seven Nades, Free Space, etc. He became the front man for soul, rock, and hip hop group Maktub, with whom he has recorded five albums.^[6][7]

In Seattle, Watts became interested in alternative performance styles. He composed musical scores for Northwest dance choreographers KT Niehoff, Amy O'Neal, Maureen Whiting, Pat Graney and Beth Huerta. He dabbled in sketch comedy with future theatrical collaborator Tommy Smith.^[8]

Watts' genesis as a solo performer started to emerge at the beginning of 2002. While touring years earlier with the Wayne Horvitz 4+1 Ensemble, Watts was forced to downsize his effects pedal from a Roland Space Echo tape delay to a Line 6 DL4 delay modeler, a smaller device that makes it easy to travel. He began using the Line 6 in live shows with Maktub, in order to replicate the duplicate harmonies from the recorded material. Then he experimented with improvising entire songs in solo acts with the Line 6, playing initial gigs at small Seattle venues and artist bungalows. Inspired by The State and Wet Hot American Summer, he began infusing spontaneous comedic material with the beat box-driven musical compositions.^[9]

Brooklyn/Manhattan (2004–present)[link]

Wanting to concentrate on solo comedic performance, Watts moved to the Lower East Side, New York City, in 2004. He shot comedic web shorts for Superdeluxe, Vimeo and CollegeHumor, where his video "What About Blowjobs?" became a viral hit. He also formed a theatrical collaboration with playwright Tommy Smith, and began developing web philosophy/content with online entrepreneur Jakob Lodwick, with whom he recorded the EP Pot Cookies. Moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 2006, Watts started to branch out into performing for television and film, while continuing to pursue live performance and the creation of new performance technologies.^{[citation needed]}

Solo performance[link]

Watts was the opening act for Conan O'Brien on The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, and appeared as the musical guest on the sixth, twenty-eighth, fifty-first, and 108th episodes of Conan.^[10] He also recently recorded material for his Comedy Central special Why Shit So Crazy?, released as a dual DVD/CD package.^[7]

Watts' recent solo comedic experience includes gigs at Fusebox, SXSW, Bonnaroo, Brian Eno's Luminous Festival at the Sydney Opera House, The Louvre, Montreal Comedy Festival, PopTech!, Soho Theatre (London), Vancouver Comedy Festival, CollegeHumor's "CH Live" stand-up comedy series, The Edinburgh Festival, Bumbershoot, The Sydney Festival, Sasquatch, Outside Lands Festival and cities throughout the world including Amsterdam's Boom Chicago, Paris, Cologne, Madrid, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Melbourne, Cape Town and Reykjavik, among others.

Watts frequently collaborates with performers/musicians around the globe. He appeared as part of the Ensemble cast of UK beatboxer Beardyman's Complete and Utter Shambles show at the Udderbelly during its residency at South Bank. He was the opening act for Regina Spektor on her European tour; he recorded vocals for Spektor's song "Dance Anthem of the 80s". He collaborated with French singer Camile Dalmais in a performance at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. He also contributed two tracks to DFA Records' Spaghetti Circus. He also performed with dance-punk band LCD Soundsystem during their first two farewell shows at Terminal 5 in New York City, and again at their final show at Madison Square Garden.

Watts' second stand-up special, Reggie Watts: A "Live" in Central Park, premiered on May 12, 2012 on Comedy Central in the "Secret Stash" completely uncensored.^[11]

Television/video[link]

On screen, Watts has appeared on Conan, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, HBO's The Yes Men Fix the World,^[12] Comedy Central's Michael and Michael Have Issues, Iceland TV, UK's "Funny Or Die," PBS' revamped The Electric Company and the music video "What About Blowjobs?" for CollegeHumor.^[2]

Waverly Films recently shot a one-hour special on Watts called "Why Shit So Crazy?". Created as a dual DVD/CD, the special features Watts in live performance at New York venues Galapagos, The Bellhouse and Le Poisson Rouge, bookended with brief sketches and a music video of Watts' "Fuck Shit Stack". As a composer, he wrote and performed music for comedian Louis CK's show, Louie,^[13] and created the theme songs for Key & Peele, Comedy Death-Ray Radio and Kristen Schaal's Penelope Princess of Pets. In 2010, Watts appeared on the Movie Network/Movie Central/HBO Canada produced Funny As Hell, a comedy series taped during the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal, Quebec.^[14]

In 2012, Watts will co-star as the music portion of the new "Independent Film Channel" show titled "Comedy Bang Bang", based on the comedy podcast of the same name (formerly "Comedy Death-Ray Radio").^[15]

Also in 2012 Watts was in the Peter Serafinowicz directed music video for the Hot Chip song 'Night and Day' ^[16]

Theatre[link]

Starting in 2007, Watts began creating experimental multi-media theater with long-time friend and playwright Tommy Smith.^[8] They have generated four pieces, Transition, Disinformation, Radioplay and Dutch A/V. The collaborations between Watts and Smith feature a wide array of performing artists including dancer/choreographer Amy O'Neal (locust), comedian/actor Beth Hoyt, singer Orianna Herrman (Oracle), journalist Brendan Kiley ("The Stranger"), aerial artist Jeslyn Kelly (Fuerzabruta), and projected imagery by ex-Wooster Group video artist Joby Emmons.

Transition played at The Under The Radar Festival at The Public Theater, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time Based Art Festival and On the Boards (Seattle); it was also the winner of the MAP Fund Award and Creative Capital award. Disinformation was seen at the UTR Festival, PICA: TBA, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), The Warhol Museum (Pittsburgh), and ICA (Boston). Radioplay premiered at Ars Nova (New York), and played at Seattle Rep (Bumbershoot), IRT Theater (New York) and Redhouse (Syracuse). Dutch A/V, a live environmental film performance and winner of the MAP Fund Award, was workshopped at IRT Theatre (New York).

Watts and Smith also regularly host Occurrence, a cabaret of alternative performers, which has been seen at Ars Nova, Galapagos, The Tank, Leftbank (Portland) and various other venues. A recording of their show Transition at On the Boards helped launch the first-ever live performance download website, OTBTV.

Awards[link]

He is winner of the 2005 Malcolm Hardee "Oy Oy" Award, the 2006 Andy Kaufman Comedy Award, and the 2006 Seattle Mayor's Arts Award.^[17] He was also awarded the 2008 MAP Fund and the 2009 Creative Capitol Grant for the performing arts, and won the 2009 ECNY Award for Best Musical Comedy Act.^[6]

Personal life[link]

Author Alice Walker is Watts' second cousin^[1] but he has not met her.^[18]

Discography[link]

• Simplified (2004)
• Pot Cookies (EP) (2008)
• Why Shit So Crazy? (2010)^[19]
• Live At Third Man (2011)^[20]
• A Live At Central Park (2012)

With Wayne Horvitz

• 4+1 Ensemble (Intution, 1996 [1998])
• From a Window (Avant, 2000)

Filmography[link]

• Tell Your Friends! (2011) as Himself
• The Yes Men Fix the World (2009) as Himself^[12]
• Steel of Fire Warriors 2010 A.D. (2008) as Mutantzoid Underling in Bar

References[link]

External links[link]

• Reggie Watts Website
• Reggie Watts at the Internet Movie Database
• Reggie Watts on Twitter
• Official "Fuck Shit Stack" video
• Official "What About Blowjobs?" video
• ReggieWatts/TommySmith Theatre

Alan Wilson Watts

Born	(1915-01-06)6 January 1915 Chislehurst, Kent, England
Died	16 November 1973(1973-11-16) (aged 58) Mt. Tamalpais, California, USA
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Eastern Philosophy
School	Zen Buddhism · Hinduism · Pantheism · Religious naturalism · Taoism
Main interests	Personal identity · Higher consciousness · Aesthetics  · Public Ethics

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. Pursuing a career, he attended Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, where he received a master's degree in theology. Watts became an Episcopal priest but left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies.

Living on the West Coast, Watts gained a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area while working as a volunteer programmer at KPFA, a Pacifica Radio station in Berkeley. Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not just a religion. Like Aldous Huxley before him, he explored human consciousness in the essay, "The New Alchemy" (1958), and in the book, The Joyous Cosmology (1962).

Towards the end of his life, he divided his time between a houseboat in Sausalito and a cabin on Mount Tamalpais. His legacy has been kept alive by his son, Mark Watts, and by many of his recorded talks and lectures that have found new life on the Internet. According to the critic Erik Davis, his "writings and recorded talks still shimmer with a profound and galvanizing lucidity."^[1]

Early years[link]

Watts was born to middle class parents in the village of Chislehurst, Kent, in 1915, living at 3 (now 5) Holbrook Lane. His father was a representative for the London office of the Michelin Tyre Company, his mother a housewife whose father had been a missionary. With modest financial means, they chose to live in pastoral surroundings and Alan, an only child, grew up playing at brookside, learning the names of wildflowers and butterflies.^[2] Probably because of the influence of his mother’s religious family^[3] the Buchans, an interest in "ultimate things" seeped in. But it mixed with Alan’s own interests in storybook fables and romantic tales of the mysterious Far East.^[4]

Watts also later wrote of a mystical vision he experienced while ill with a fever as a child. During this time he was influenced by Far Eastern landscape paintings and embroideries that had been given to his mother by missionaries returning from China. The few Chinese paintings Watts was able to see in England riveted him, and he wrote "I was aesthetically fascinated with a certain clarity, transparency, and spaciousness in Chinese and Japanese art. It seemed to float...".^[5] These works of art emphasized the participative relationship of man in nature, a theme that stood fast throughout his life.

Buddhism[link]

Seated Great Buddha (Daibutsu), Kamakura, Japan

By his own assessment, Watts was imaginative, headstrong, and talkative. He was sent to boarding schools (which included both academic and religious training of the Muscular Christianity sort) from early years. Of this religious training, he remarked “Throughout my schooling my religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin…”^[6] During holidays in his teen years, Francis Croshaw, a wealthy Epicurean with strong interests in both Buddhism and the exotic little-known aspects of European culture, took Watts on a trip through France. It was not long afterward that Watts felt forced to decide between the Anglican Christianity he had been exposed to and the Buddhism he had read about in various libraries, including Croshaw’s. He chose Buddhism, and sought membership in the London Buddhist Lodge, which had been established by Theosophists, and was now run by the barrister Christmas Humphreys. Watts became the organization’s secretary at 16 (1931). The young Watts explored several styles of meditation during these years.

Education[link]

Watts attended The King's School next door to Canterbury Cathedral. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically, and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as presumptuous and capricious.^[7]

Hence, when he graduated from secondary school, Watts was thrust into the world of employment, working in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and also under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović. (Mitrinović was himself influenced by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler.) Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom. By his own reckoning, and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact. His involvement with the Buddhist Lodge in London afforded Watts a considerable number of opportunities for personal growth. Through Humphreys, he contacted eminent spiritual authors (e.g., Nicholas Roerich, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan) and prominent theosophists like Alice Bailey. In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D. T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, Watts absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.

Influences and first publication[link]

In 1936, Watts' first book was published, The Spirit of Zen, which he later acknowledged to be mainly digested from the writings of Suzuki.

In 1938 he and his bride left England to live in America. He had married Eleanor Everett, whose mother Ruth Fuller Everett was involved with a traditional Zen Buddhist circle in New York. A few years later, Ruth Fuller married the Zen master (or "roshi"), Sokei-an Sasaki, and this Japanese gentleman served as a sort of model and mentor to Watts, though he chose not to enter into a formal Zen training relationship with Sasaki. During these years, according to his later writings, Watts had another mystical experience while on a walk with his wife.

Watts' fascination with the Zen (or Chan) tradition—beginning during the 1930s—developed because that tradition embodied the spiritual, interwoven with the practical, as exemplified in the subtitle of his Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East. "Work," "life," and "art" were not demoted due to a spiritual focus.

Priesthood and after[link]

Watts left formal Zen training in New York because the method of the teacher didn't suit him. He was not ordained as a Zen monk, but he felt a need to find a professional outlet for his philosophical inclinations. He entered Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, an Anglican (Episcopalian) school in Evanston, Illinois, where he studied Christian scriptures, theology, and Church history. He attempted to work out a blend of contemporary Christian worship, mystical Christianity, and Asian philosophy. Watts was awarded a master's degree in theology in response to his thesis, which he published as a popular edition under the title Behold the Spirit. The pattern was set, in that Watts did not hide his dislike for religious outlooks that he decided were dour, guilt-ridden, or militantly proselytizing—no matter if they were found within Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, or Buddhism.

All seemed to go reasonably well in his next role, as Episcopalian priest (beginning in 1945, aged 30), until an extramarital affair resulted in his young wife having their marriage annulled. It also resulted in Watts leaving the ministry by 1950. He spent the New Year getting to know Joseph Campbell; his wife, Jean Erdman; and John Cage.

In early 1951, Watts moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. Here he taught alongside Saburō Hasegawa, Frederic Spiegelberg, Haridas Chaudhuri, lama Tokwan Tada, and various visiting experts and professors. Hasegawa, in particular, served as a teacher to Watts in the areas of Japanese customs, arts, primitivism, and perceptions of nature. Besides teaching, Watts served for several years as the Academy's administrator. One notable student of his was Eugene Rose, who later went on to become a famous Hieromonk and theologian in the Eastern Orthodox Church of America.

Watts also studied written Chinese and practiced Chinese brush calligraphy with Hasegawa as well as with some of the Chinese students who enrolled at the Academy. While Watts was noted for an interest in Zen Buddhism, his reading and discussions delved into Vedanta, "the new physics", cybernetics, semantics, process philosophy, natural history, and the anthropology of sexuality.

Middle years[link]

After heading up the Academy for a few years, Watts left the faculty for a freelance career in the mid 1950s. In 1953, he began what became a long-running weekly radio program at Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley, which continued until his death in 1973. Like other volunteer programmers at the listener-sponsored station, Watts was not paid for his broadcasts; they did, however, gain him a large following in the San Francisco Bay Area. These programs were later carried by additional Pacifica stations, and were re-broadcast many times over in the decades following his death. The original tapes are currently held by the Pacifica Radio Archives, based at KPFK in Los Angeles, and at the Electronic University archive founded by his son, Mark Watts (alanwatts.org).

In 1957 when 42, Watts published one of his best known books, The Way of Zen, which focused on philosophical explication and history. Besides drawing on the lifestyle and philosophical background of Zen, in India and China, Watts introduced ideas drawn from general semantics (directly from the writings of Alfred Korzybski and also from Norbert Wiener's early work on cybernetics, which had recently been published). Watts offered analogies from cybernetic principles possibly applicable to the Zen life. The book sold well, eventually becoming a modern classic, and helped widen his lecture circuit.

Around this time, Watts toured parts of Europe with his father, meeting the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. In relation to modern psychology, Watts's instincts were closer to Jung's or Abraham Maslow's than to those of Freud.

Experimentation[link]

When he returned to the United States, he began to dabble in psychedelic drug experiences, initially with mescaline given to him by Dr. Oscar Janiger. He tried LSD several times with various research teams led by Drs. Keith Ditman, Sterling Bunnell, and Michael Agron. He also tried marijuana and concluded that it was a useful and interesting psychoactive drug that gave the impression of time slowing down. Watts’ books of the ’60s reveal the influence of these chemical adventures on his outlook. He would later comment about psychedelic drug use, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."^[8]

For a time, Watts came to prefer writing in the language of modern science and psychology (Psychotherapy East and West is a good example), finding a parallel between mystical experiences and the theories of the material universe proposed by 20th-century physicists. He later equated mystical experience with ecological awareness, and typically emphasized whichever approach seemed best suited to the audience he was addressing.

Supporters and critics[link]

Watts's explorations and teaching brought him into contact with many noted intellectuals, artists, and American teachers in the human potential movement. His friendship with poet Gary Snyder nurtured his sympathies with the budding environmental movement, to which Watts gave philosophical support. He also encountered Robert Anton Wilson, who credited Watts with being one of his "Light[s] along the Way" in the opening appreciation of Cosmic Trigger.

Though never affiliated for long with any one academic institution, he did have a fellowship for several years at Harvard University. He also lectured to many college and university students. His lectures and books gave him far-reaching influence on the American intelligentsia of the 1950s–1970s, but he was often seen as an outsider in academia. When questioned sharply by students during his talk at University of California Santa Cruz in 1970, Watts responded that he was not an academic philosopher but rather "a philosophical entertainer."

Watts has been criticized by Buddhists such as Roshi Philip Kapleau, John Daido Loori, and D. T. Suzuki for allegedly misinterpreting several key concepts of Zen Buddhism. Examples of the criticisms by those who believe that zazen can only be achieved by a strict and specific means of sitting as opposed to a cultivated state of mind available at any moment in any situation would be when Kapleau claimed that Watts dismissed zazen on the basis of only half a koan.^[9] In regard to the aforementioned koan, Robert Baker Aitken reports that Suzuki told him "I regret to say that Mr. Watts did not understand that story."^[10] In Loori's translation of Dogen's The True Dharma Eye, the author also mentions this and expands further to suggest that Zen in its essence is zazen, and cannot be grasped without the practice. This had been the predominant interpretation of Zen in the West before Alan Watts began to write. One major point raised today, however, is that the state of Zen is like that of a dog, always in the moment, regretting nothing. Although in one Koan Zhaozhou is said to have answered that a Dog does not have Buddha nature, in a different Koan from the same period Zhaozhou answered the same question in the positive, demonstrating the disagreements between the sects of 'walking monks' and 'sitting monks' that go back thousands of years. In his talks, Watts addressed the issue of defining zazen practice when he said, "A cat sits until it is tired of sitting, then gets up, stretches, and walks away."

He did, however, have his supporters in the Zen community, including Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. As David Chadwick recounted in his biography of Suzuki, when a student of Suzuki's disparaged Watts by saying “we used to think he was profound until we found the real thing," Suzuki "fumed with a sudden intensity," saying, "You completely miss the point about Alan Watts! You should notice what he has done. He is a great bodhisattva."^[11]

Applied aesthetics[link]

Watts often wrote about, or sometimes alluded to, a group of neighbors in Druid Heights (near Mill Valley, California), who had endeavored to combine architecture, gardening, and carpentry skills to make a beautiful and comfortable life for themselves. These neighbors accomplished this by relying on their own talents and using their own hands, as they lived in what has been called "shared bohemian poverty."^[12] Druid Heights was founded by the writer Elsa Gidlow,^[13] and Watts dedicated his book The Joyous Cosmology to the people of this neighborhood.^[14]

Regarding his intentions, Watts attempted to lessen the alienation that accompanies the experience of being human that he felt plagued the modern Westerner, and (like his fellow British expatriate and friend, Aldous Huxley) to lessen the ill will that was an unintentional by-product of alienation from the natural world. He felt such teaching could improve the world, at least to a degree. He also articulated the possibilities for greater incorporation of aesthetics (for example: better architecture, more art, more fine cuisine) in American life. In his autobiography he wrote, "… cultural renewal comes about when highly differentiated cultures mix".^[15]

In his last novel Island (1962), Aldous Huxley mentions the religious practice of maithuna as being something like what Roman Catholics call "coitus reservatus". A few years before, Alan Watts had discussed the theme in his own book Nature, Man and Woman. There, he discusses the possibility of the practice being known to early Christians and of it being kept secretly by the Church.

Later years[link]

In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages.

In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of great interest to him.

Though known for his Zen teachings, he was equally if not more influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine Reality Man that Man misses, how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the ‘Out of Your Mind’ series.

On the personal level, Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature".

In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; as one instance, in the early 1960s he wrote: “Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?"^[16] These concerns were later expressed in a television pilot made for NET filmed at his mountain retreat in 1971 in which he noted that the single track of conscious attention was wholly inadequate for interactions with a multi-tracked world.

Political stance[link]

Distrusting both the established political left and right, Watts found political inspiration in the Chinese sage Chuang-Tzu, an ancient Taoist thinker^{[citation needed]}. He disliked much in the conventional idea of "progress." He hoped for change, but personally he preferred amiable, semi-isolated rural social enclaves, and also believed in tolerance for urban tenderloins, social misfits, and eccentric artists. Watts decried the suburbanization of the countryside and the way of life that went with it.

In one campus lecture tour, which Watts titled "The End to the Put-Down of Man", Watts presented positive images for both nature and humanity, spoke in favor of the various stages of human growth (including the teenage years), reproached excessive cynicism and rivalry, and extolled intelligent creativity, good architecture and food^{[citation needed]}.

On spiritual and social identity[link]

Watts felt that absolute morality had nothing to do with the fundamental realization of one’s deep spiritual identity. He advocated social rather than personal ethics. In his writings, Watts was increasingly concerned with ethics applied to relations between humanity and the natural environment and between governments and citizens. He wrote out of an appreciation of a racially and culturally diverse social landscape.

He often said that he wished to act as a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, and between culture and nature.

Watts led some tours for Westerners to the Buddhist temples of Japan. He also studied some movements from the traditional Chinese martial art T'ai chi ch'uan, with an Asian colleague, Al Chung-liang Huang.

Worldview[link]

In several of his later publications, especially Beyond Theology and The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Watts put forward a worldview, drawing on Hinduism, Chinese philosophy, pantheism, and modern science, in which he maintains that the whole universe consists of a cosmic self playing hide-and-seek (Lila), hiding from itself (Maya) by becoming all the living and non-living things in the universe, forgetting what it really is; the upshot being that we are all IT in disguise. In this worldview, Watts asserts that our conception of ourselves as an "ego in a bag of skin" is a myth; the entities we call the separate "things" are merely processes of the whole.

Internet phenomenon[link]

As part of his growing popularity, Matt Stone and Trey Parker—creators of the animated series South Park—have also contributed a video tribute by animating some of his lectures. This has spawned a culture of user-animated videos all around the net.^[17]

Personal life[link]

Watts married three times and had seven children, five daughters and two sons. His oldest son, Mark Watts, currently serves as curator of his father's work.

Watts met Eleanor Everett in 1936, when her mother, Ruth Fuller Everett, brought her to London to study piano. They met at the Buddhist Lodge, were engaged the following year and married in April 1938. A daughter, Joan, was born November 1938 and another, Anne, was born in 1943. Their marriage ended eleven years later, but Watts continued to correspond with his former mother-in-law.^[18]

After leaving Eleanor in 1950, Watts married Dorothy DeWitt and moved to San Francisco in early 1951 to teach. They began a family that grew to include five children: Tia, Mark, Richard, Lila, and Diane. However the couple separated in the early sixties after Watts met Mary Jane Yates King while lecturing in New York. After a difficult divorce he married Mary Jane in 1964.

Watts lived with Mary Jane in Sausalito, California, in the mid-60s.^[19] He lived his later years at times on a houseboat in Sausalito called the Vallejo,^[20] and at times in a secluded cabin on Mount Tamalpais.

In October 1973, Watts returned from an exhausting European lecture tour to his cabin in Mount Tamalpais. On November 16, 1973, he died in his sleep of heart failure.

Publications[link]

• 1936 The Spirit of Zen, Paperback. 1969 ISBN 0-8021-3056-9 A preview from Google Books
• 1937 The Legacy of Asia and Western Man
• 1940 The Meaning of Happiness, Paperback. 1970, ISBN 0-06-080178-6
• 1944 Theologica Mystica of St. Dionysius, (translation from Greek of pseudo-Dionysius, available online)
• 1948 Behold the Spirit:A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion, Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71761-9
• 1950 Easter – Its Story and Meaning
• 1950 The Supreme Identity, Vintage ed. 1972, ISBN 0-394-71835-6
• 1951 The Wisdom of Insecurity, Vintage ed. 1968, ISBN 0-394-70468-1
• 1953 Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Beacon Press 1971, ISBN 0-8070-1375-7
• 1957 The Way of Zen, Vintage Spiritual Classics 1999, ISBN 0-375-70510-4
• 1958 Nature, Man, and Woman, Vintage reissue 1991, ISBN 0-679-73233-0
• 1959 Beat Zen Square Zen and Zen, Paperback, ASIN B000F2RQL4
• 1960 "This Is It" and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience, Vintage reprint 1973, ISBN 0-394-71904-2
• 1961 Psychotherapy East and West, Vintage ed. 1975, ISBN 0-394-71609-4 An excerpt
• 1962 The Joyous Cosmology – Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness
• 1963 The Two Hands of God – The Myths of Polarity
• 1964 Beyond Theology – The Art of Godmanship, Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71923-9
• 1966 The Book – On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Vintage reissue 1989, ISBN 0-679-72300-5 An excerpt
• 1967 Nonsense, ISBN 0-525-47463-3. (This book is a spiritual application of literary nonsense).
• 1970 Does It Matter?: Essays on Man's Relation to Materiality, Vintage ed. 1971, ISBN 0-394-71665-5
• 1971 Erotic Spirituality – The Vision of Konarak
• 1972 The Art of Contemplation
• 1972 In My Own Way – An Autobiography 1915–1965, Vintage 1973, ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google Books
• 1973 Cloud-hidden, Whereabouts Unknown: A Mountain Journal, Vintage 1974, ISBN 0-394-71999-9

Posthumous publications[link]

• 1974 The Essence of Alan Watts, ed. Mark Watts, Celestial Arts 1977, ISBN 0-89087-210-4
• 1975 Tao: The Watercourse Way, with Al Chung-liang Huang, Pantheon 1977, ISBN 0-394-73311-8
• 1976 Essential Alan Watts ed. Mark Watts,
• 1978 Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk: The Mystery of Life
• 1979 Om: Creative Meditations ed. Mark Watts,
• 1982 Play to Live ed. Mark Watts,
• 1983 Way of Liberation: Essays and Lectures on the Transformation of the Self ed. Mark Watts,
• 1985 Out of the Trap ed. Mark Watts,
• 1986 Diamond Web ed. Mark Watts,
• 1987 The Early Writings of Alan Watts, Paperback. 1995, ISBN 0-89087-794-7
• 1990 The Modern Mystic: A New Collection of Early Writings
• 1994 Talking Zen ed. Mark Watts,
• 1995 Become What You Are, Shambhala Expanded ed. 2003, ISBN 1-57062-940-4
• 1995 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion ed. Mark Watts, A preview from Google Books
• 1995 The Philosophies of Asia ed. Mark Watts,
• 1995 The Tao of Philosophy, ed. Mark Watts, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing 1999, ISBN 0-8048-3204-8
• 1996 Myth and Religion ed. Mark Watts,
• 1997 Taoism: Way Beyond Seeking ed. Mark Watts,
• 1997 Zen and the Beat Way ed. Mark Watts,
• 1998 Culture of Counterculture ed. Mark Watts,
• 1999 Buddhism: The Religion of No-Religion, ed. Mark Watts, edited transcripts, Tuttle Publishing, ISBN 0-8048-3203-X
• 2000 What Is Zen?, editor: Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 0-394-71951-4 A preview from Google Books
• 2000 What Is Tao?, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-168-X
• 2000 Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation, ed. Mark Watts, New World Library, ISBN 1-57731-214-7
• 2000 Eastern Wisdom, ed. Mark Watts, MJF Books, ISBN 1-56731-491-0, three books in one volume: What is Zen?, What is Tao?, and An Introduction to Meditation (Still the Mind). These were assembled from transcriptions of audio tape recordings made by his son Mark, of lectures and seminars given by Alan Watts during the last decade of his life. They constitute simplified introductions to the philosophies he taught.
• 2002 Zen, the Supreme Experience: The Newly Discovered Scripts, ed. Mark Watts, Vega
• 2006 Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life: Collected Talks, 1960-1969, New World Library

Audio and video works, essays[link]

Including recordings of lectures at major universities and multi-session seminars: Many of his works have made it easier for western people to apprehend eastern esoteric thinking, which until now required western people to travel to Asia and spend years learning the subtle nuances of the profound traditions.

• 1960 Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life, television series, (here)
• 1960 Essential Lectures, audio recordings, (here)
• 1960 Nature of Consciousness, essay, (here)
• 1960 The Value of Psychotic Experience
• 1960 The World As Emptiness
• 1960 From Time to Eternity
• 1960 Lecture On Zen
• 1960 The Cross of Cards
• 1960 Taoism
• 1962 This Is IT
• 1968 "Psychedelics & Religious Experience", in California Law Review (here)
• 1969 Why Not Now: The Art of Meditation
• 1971 A Conversation With Myself (part 1 part 2part 3)
• 1994 Zen: The Best of Alan Watts (VHS)
• 2005 Do You Do It, or Does It Do You?: how to let the universe meditate you (CD)
• 2007 Zen Meditations with Alan Watts, DVD, (here)

Biographical publications[link]

• Genuine Fake: a Biography of Alan Watts, by Monica Furlong, Published by Heinemann, 1986

Academic connections[link]

Saybrook University offers the only course on Watts in the United States and perhaps the world (HTP 3075: The Life of Alan Watts). Saybrook also has the only Watts academic chair in the world, which is held by Stanley Krippner, Executive Faculty Member.^{[citation needed]}

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Aitken, Robert. Original Dwelling Place. Counterpoint. Washington, D.C. 1997. ISBN 1-887178-41-4 (paperback)
• Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hard cover); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (paperback)
• Furlong, Monica, Zen Effects: The Life of Alan Watts Houghton Mifflin. New York. 1986 ISBN 0-395-45392-5, Skylight Paths 2001 edition of the biography, with new foreword by author: ISBN 1-893361-32-2
• Kapleau, Philip. Three Pillars of Zen (1967) Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-5975-7
• Stirling, Isabel. "Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki" Shoemaker & Hoard. 2006. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3
• Watts, Alan, In My Own Way New York. Random House Pantheon. 1973 ISBN 0-394-46911-9 (his autobiography)

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Alan Watts

• The Alan Watts Electronic University – Alan Watts audio and video courses, co-founded by Alan Watts, Mark Watts, and Henry Jacobs in 1973.
• Alan Watts Podcast – The official Podcast of Alan Watts
• Master Enlightenments Arts Seminars and Lectures by Alan Watts – Looking at many different forms of enlightenment – Recorded by Henry Jacobs in 1964/65 who set up the original Alan Watts radio network.
• Alan Watts Online – Project Unicorn (also via Archive.org)
• Works by or about Alan Watts in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Watts essay on Nothingness (This link no longer functions.)
• Alan Watts Lectures and Essays Audio, video, essays and articles – resources from deoxy.org
• Alan Watts' This Is IT: The First Psychedelic LP essay by Patrick Lundborg
• Alan Watts Resource Compilation A collection of audio and video links of Alan Watts lecture and essays
• Alan Watts on YouTube, South Park Interview with Mark Watts on the resurgence of his father's work
• watts.progressiveradionetwork.org Gary Nulls online station with Alan Watts show including some archived audio lectures.
• Alan Watts. The Book: On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are

Samuel Beckett
Beckett in 1977
Born	Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906-04-13)13 April 1906 Foxrock, Dublin, Ireland
Died	22 December 1989(1989-12-22) (aged 83) Paris, France
Pen name	Andrew Belis[1]
Occupation	Novelist, playwright, poet, theatre director, essayist
Nationality	Irish
Genres	Drama, fiction, poetry, screenplays
Literary movement	Modernism
Notable work(s)	Murphy (1938) Molloy (1951) Malone Dies (1951) The Unnamable (1953) Waiting for Godot (1953) Watt (1953) Endgame (1957) Krapp's Last Tape (1958) How It Is (1961)
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1969 Croix de Guerre 1945
Influences Alighieri · Geulincx · Joyce · Proust · Racine · Schopenhauer · J.M Synge · Yeats · O'Casey · Wilde · Sade · Descartes · Sterne · Democritus · Milton · Stéphane Mallarmé  · Kant · Berkeley
Influenced Adorno · Albee · Auster · Badiou · Banville · Deleuze · Barthelme · Burroughs · Calvino · Carr · Coetzee · Davis · DeLillo · Dick · Foucault · Havel · Ionesco · Johnson · Kane · Mahon · Mamet · Nauman · Norton · O'Brien · Pettigrew · Pinter · Ruy-Sánchez · Shepard · Stoppard · McCarthy

Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.

Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.^[2] Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.

Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".^[3] He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.

Life and career[link]

Early life and education[link]

The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.^[4]

Samuel Beckett was born on Good Friday, 13 April 1906 to William Frank Beckett, a 35 year old Civil Engineer, and May Barclay (also 35 at Beckett's birth); they had married in 1901. Beckett had one older brother, Frank Edward Beckett (born 1902). At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School in the city centre near Harcourt Street. In 1919, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (which Oscar Wilde had also attended). A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler. Later, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire.^[5] As a result, he became the only Nobel laureate to have an entry in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, the "bible" of cricket^[6]

Early writings[link]

Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927 (one of his tutors was the eminent Berkeley scholar A. A. Luce). Beckett graduated with a BA, and—after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast—took up the post of lecteur d'anglais in the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. This meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake.^[7]

In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, and William Carlos Williams). Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia. Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical transition. The next year he won a small literary prize with his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit.

In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer, though he soon became disillusioned with the post. He expressed his aversion by playing a trick on the Modern Language Society of Dublin. Beckett read a learned paper in French on a Toulouse author named Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called Concentrism. Chas and Concentrism, however, were pure fiction, having been invented by Beckett to mock pedantry. When Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was terminated. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", which was inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published in the Dublin Magazine in 1934:

Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning^[8]

Beckett travelled in Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical Schopenhauerian study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion, who took him to hear Carl Jung's third Tavistock lecture, an event which Beckett still recalled many years later. The lecture focused on the subject of the "never properly born." Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot.^[9] In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it was eventually published in 1993). Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.

Beckett published a number of essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman, August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems (in The Dublin Magazine, July–September 1934). They focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and the French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon.^[10]

In 1935—the year that Beckett successfully published a book of his poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates—Beckett worked on his novel Murphy. In May, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. In mid-1936 he wrote to Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin to offer himself as their apprentices. Nothing came of this, however, as Beckett's letter was lost owing to Eisenstein's quarantine during the smallpox outbreak, as well as his focus on a script re-write of his postponed film production. Beckett, meanwhile, finished Murphy and then, in 1936, departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen and noted his distaste for the Nazi savagery that was overtaking the country. Returning to Ireland briefly in 1937, he oversaw the publication of Murphy (1938), which he translated into French the following year. He fell out with his mother, which contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris. Beckett remained in Paris following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, preferring, in his own words, "France at war to Ireland at peace".^[11] His was soon a known face in and around Left Bank cafés, where he strengthened his allegiance with Joyce and forged new ones with artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp, with whom he regularly played chess. Sometime around December 1937, Beckett had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him "Oblomov" (after the character in Ivan Goncharov's novel).^[12]

In January 1938 in Paris, Beckett was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp (who went by the name of Prudent). Joyce arranged a private room for Beckett at the hospital. The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, who previously knew Beckett slightly from his first stay in Paris. This time, however, the two would begin a lifelong companionship. At a preliminary hearing, Beckett asked his attacker for the motive behind the stabbing. Prudent replied: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse" ["I do not know, sir. I'm sorry"].^[13] Beckett eventually dropped the charges against his attacker—partially to avoid further formalities, partly because he found Prudent likeable and well-mannered. Beckett occasionally recounted the incident in jest.^{[citation needed]}

World War II[link]

Beckett joined the French Resistance after the 1940 occupation by Germany, in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over the next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo. In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon, in the Vaucluse département in the Provence Alpes Cote d'Azur region. There he continued to assist the Resistance by storing armaments in the back yard of his home. During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life.^[14]

Beckett was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff".^[15][16] While in hiding in Roussillon, he continued work on the novel Watt (begun in 1941 and completed in 1945, but not published until 1953, though an extract had appeared in the Dublin literary periodical Envoy).

Fame: novels and the theatre[link]

In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother’s room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. Beckett had felt that he would remain forever in the shadow of Joyce, certain to never best him at his own game. His revelation prompted him to change direction and to acknowledge both his own stupidity and his interest in ignorance and impotence:

"I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."^[17]

Portrait of Samuel Beckett by Reginald Gray, painted in Paris, 1961 (from the collection of Ken White, Dublin).

Knowlson argues that "Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it ... In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss – as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er.'"^[18] The revelation "has rightly been regarded as a pivotal moment in his entire career." Beckett fictionalised the experience in his play Krapp's Last Tape (1958). While listening to a tape he made earlier in his life, Krapp hears his younger self say "clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most...", at which point Krapp fast-forwards the tape (before the audience can hear the complete revelation). Beckett later explained to Knowlson that the missing words on the tape are "precious ally".^[18]

In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes published the first part of Beckett’s short story "Suite" (later to be called "La fin", or "The End"), not realizing that Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story; Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. Beckett also began to write his fourth novel, Mercier et Camier, which was not published until 1970. The novel presaged his most famous work, the play Waiting for Godot, which was written not long afterwards. More importantly, the novel was Beckett’s first long work that he wrote in French, the language of most of his subsequent works, including the poioumenon "trilogy" of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable. Despite being a native English speaker, Beckett wrote in French because—as he himself claimed—it was easier for him thus to write "without style".^[19]

Beckett is most famous for his play Waiting for Godot (1953). In a much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett "has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice."^[20] Like most of his works after 1947, the play was first written in French with the title En attendant Godot. Beckett worked on the play between October 1948 and January 1949.^[21] He published it in 1952 and it premièred in 1953; an English translation appeared two years later. The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide turned with positive reactions from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times and, later, Kenneth Tynan. In the United States, it flopped in Miami and had a qualified success in New York City. After this, the play became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the US and Germany. It is frequently performed today.

Beckett translated all of his works into English himself, with the exception of Molloy, for which he collaborated with Patrick Bowles. The success of Waiting for Godot opened up a career in theatre for its author. Beckett went on to write a number of successful full-length plays, including Endgame (1957), the Krapp's Last Tape (1958, written in English), Happy Days (1961, also written in English), and Play (1963). In 1961, Beckett received the International Publishers' Formentor Prize in recognition of his work, which he shared that year with Jorge Luis Borges.

Later life and death[link]

Tomb of Samuel Beckett at the Cimetière de Montparnasse

The 1960s was a period of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. In 1961, he married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England (its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law). The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. In 1956, he had his first commission from the BBC Third Programme for a radio play, All That Fall. He continued writing sporadically for radio and extended his scope to include cinema and television. He began to write in English again, although he also wrote in French until the end of his life.

From the late 1950s until his death, Beckett had a relationship with Barbara Bray, a widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC. Knowlson wrote of them: "She was small and attractive, but, above all, keenly intelligent and well-read. Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted by her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life".^[22]

In October 1969 while on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne, Beckett heard that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Anticipating that her intensely private husband would be saddled with fame from that moment on, Suzanne called the award a "catastrophe".^[23] In true ascetic fashion, he gave away all of the prize money. While Beckett did not devote much time to interviews, he sometimes met the artists, scholars, and admirers who sought him out in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM St. Jacques in Paris near his Montparnasse home.^[24] Although an intensely private man, a review of the second volume of Beckett's letters by Roy Foster, appearing in the December 15, 2011 issue of The New Republic, reveals Beckett to be not only unexpectedly amiable but frequently prepared to talk about his work and particularly about the process behind it.^[25]

Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease, Beckett died on 22 December of the same year. The two were interred together in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be "any colour, so long as it's grey."

Works[link]

Caricature of Beckett by Edmund S. Valtman

Beckett's career as a writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which period he wrote what are probably his best-known works; and his late period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during which his works tended to become shorter and his style more minimalist.

Early works[link]

Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly influenced by the work of his friend James Joyce. They are erudite and seem to display the author's learning merely for its own sake, resulting in several obscure passages. The opening phrases of the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934) affords a representative sample of this style:

It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular.^[26]

The passage makes reference to Dante's Commedia, which can serve to confuse readers not familiar with that work. It also anticipates aspects of Beckett's later work: the physical inactivity of the character Belacqua; the character's immersion in his own head and thoughts; the somewhat irreverent comedy of the final sentence.

Similar elements are present in Beckett's first published novel, Murphy (1938), which also explores the themes of insanity and chess (both of which would be recurrent elements in Beckett's later works). The novel's opening sentence hints at the somewhat pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's works: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new".^[27] Watt, written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World War II, is similar in terms of themes but less exuberant in its style. It explores human movement as if it were a mathematical permutation, presaging Beckett's later preoccupation—in both his novels and dramatic works—with precise movement.

Beckett's 1930 essay Proust was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer's pessimism and laudatory descriptions of saintly asceticism. At this time Beckett began to write creatively in the French language. In the late 1930s, he wrote a number of short poems in that language and their sparseness—in contrast to the density of his English poems of roughly the same period, collected in Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935)—seems to show that Beckett, albeit through the medium of another language, was in process of simplifying his style, a change also evidenced in Watt.

Middle period[link]

After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language as a vehicle. It was this, together with the "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin—in which he realized that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which Beckett is best remembered today.

During the 15 years following the war, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting for Godot), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in the so-called "Theatre of the Absurd"—deal in a very blackly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers. The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and Godot were centerpieces of the book. Esslin claimed these plays were the fulfillment of Albert Camus's concept of "the absurd";^[29] this is one reason Beckett is often falsely labeled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist, though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded his own philosophy). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.^[30]

Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. The words of Nell—one of the two characters in Endgame who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best summarize the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with a will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more."^[31]

Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies) and L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable). In these novels—sometimes referred to as a "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit wishes—the prose becomes increasingly bare and stripped down.^[32] Molloy, for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a conventional novel (time, place, movement, and plot) and it makes use of the structure of a detective novel. In Malone Dies, however, movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication of place and the passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an interior monologue. Finally, in The Unnamable, almost all sense of place and time are abolished, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing, and its almost equally strong urge towards silence and oblivion. Despite the widely held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by the novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final phrase of The Unnamable: 'I can't go on, I'll go on'.^[33]

After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as Texts for Nothing. In the late 1950s, however, he created one of his most radical prose works, Comment c'est (1961; How It Is). This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese: "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in the dark"^[34] Following this work, it would be almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose. How It Is is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer. In 1959 he contributed to the British arts review X (magazine) with L'Image.

Late works[link]

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the 1950s—towards compactness. This has led to his work sometimes being described as minimalist. The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece Breath, which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on Oh! Calcutta!, the theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece).^[35]

In his theatre of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled Play (1962), for instance, consists of three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. The television drama Eh Joe (1963), which was written for the actor Jack MacGowran, is animated by a camera that steadily closes in to a tight focus upon the face of the title character. The play Not I (1972) consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, "a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness".^[36] Following from Krapp's Last Tape, many of these later plays explore memory, often in the form of a forced recollection of haunting past events in a moment of stillness in the present. They also deal with the theme of the self confined and observed, with a voice that either comes from outside into the protagonist's head (as in Eh Joe) or else another character comments on the protagonist silently, by means of gesture (as in Not I). Beckett's most politically charged play, Catastrophe (1982), which was dedicated to Václav Havel, deals relatively explicitly with the idea of dictatorship. After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of mirlitonnades, with some as short as six words long. These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon, have attempted translations, but no complete version of the sequence has been published in English.

Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not so prolific as his theatre, as suggested by the title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts Fizzles (which the American artist Jasper Johns illustrated). Beckett experienced something of a renaissance, however, with the novella Company (1980), which continued with Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) and Worstward Ho (1984), which was later collected in Nohow On. In these three "'closed space' stories",^[37] Beckett continued his preoccupation with memory and its effect on the confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of Company make clear: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." "To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said."^[38]

In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself, a theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life.

Collaborators[link]

Jack MacGowran[link]

Jack MacGowran was the first actor to do a one-man show based on the works of Beckett. He debuted End of Day in Dublin in 1962, revising it as Beginning To End (1965). The show went through further revisions before Beckett directed it in Paris in 1970; MacGowran won the 1970-71 Obie for Best Performance By an Actor when he performed the show off-Broadway as Jack MacGowran in the Works of Samuel Beckett. Beckett wrote the radio play Embers and the teleplay Eh Joe specifically for MacGowran. The actor also appeared in various productions of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, and did several readings of Beckett's plays and poems on BBC Radio; he also recorded the LP, MacGowran Speaking Beckett.