Samuel Beckett was born in Foxrock, County Dublin, on April 13, 1906. At seventeen, he entered Trinity College, choosing French and Italian as his subjects. Beckett enjoyed the vibrant theater scene of post-independence Dublin, as well as the silent comedies of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin that would crucially influence his interest in the vaudevillian tramp. After graduation, Beckett traveled to Paris, where he met fellow Dubliner James Joyce, to whom he became a favored assistant. In 1932, Beckett wrote his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Out of money, he moved to London, where he worked on much of his next novel Murphy. Still without a steady source of income he moved constantly for the next few years before settling permanently in Paris in 1937. His first French novel, Mercier et Camier, written between 1947 and 1950—with its wandering duo, minimalist style, and insistence on repetition—predicts the concerns and form of Waiting for Godot. Between 1948 and 1949, he wrote Waiting for Godot. In the 1950s and 1960s Beckett’s playwriting continued with a series of masterpieces, including Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Happy Days.  With worldwide appreciation of his work growing, he received the Nobel Prize in 1969. His last major work, the prose fiction Stirrings Still was written in 1986. In the same year, Beckett began to suffer from emphysema. He died on December 22, 1989.