The work of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, is intriguing but can also be challenging. This book series aims to offer a way into this complex oeuvre by analysing the genesis of Beckett’s bilingual (English/French) works according to a basic principle: knowing how something was made can help us understand how and why it works.
Beckett donated many of his manuscripts to university archives. His papers are dispersed over more than a dozen public archives and several private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. The series brings this material together. Every volume focuses on a work (or in the case of shorter texts: a cluster of works) and discusses the making-of.
This volume investigates the genesis of Beckett’s first published novel, Murphy (1938). It describes and analyses the six notebooks containing the novel’s draft, the typescript, the short story ‘Lightning Calculation’ as well as the outline and the notes (including the ‘Whoroscope’ Notebook) which Beckett used during the writing process.