Andrew Gibson's intellectual biography of Samuel Beckett explores the main features of the writer's life and works. By highlighting key points of Beckett's intellectual development at elite Irish schools and at Paris's Ecole Normale Superieure, where the young man found a community of wittily ironic individualists of ethical strength, Gibson presents us with a writer who grew from being a scholar, a diligent note taker and a list maker to one of the leading intellectuals and writers of this past century. Beckett's distillation of melancholia, misericordia and caritas shows that his texts do not retell history but rather reflect the difficulty of telling it.