There were no As, and Beckett came first, before Joseph Conrad and EM Forster. “Without thinking about which name might present the best opportunity for original research,” she said years later, “or even which I liked the most, I shuffled them into alphabetical order. She wrote the names of some possibilities on index cards.īeckett replied to Bair's letter and, to her shock, said, 'Any biographical information I possess is at your disposal,' adding that 'if you come to Paris I will see you' After making too-slow progress on a medieval-studies topic, she decided to turn to a 20th-century author instead. Having received a fellowship to do graduate study at Columbia University, in New York, she needed a research subject. She came to that decision somewhat serendipitously. The American writer, who died on Friday, called herself “an accidental biographer, one who had never read a biography before she decided that Samuel Beckett needed one and she was the person to write it”. Her daughter, Katney Bair, said the cause was heart failure. Deirdre Bair, who as an unknown writer half a century ago scored a coup by getting the reclusive Samuel Beckett to agree to let her write his biography, then secured the same permission from another towering literary figure, Simone de Beauvoir, has died at the age of 84.
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