The Midcentury Godot: Beckett and Saroyan

Abstract The Writer William Saroyan is widely reported to have remarked that the impact made by Waiting for Godot would make it easier for him and for everyone else to write freely for the theater. The 2006 centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the American and Broadway premieres of Godot, and it was in the context of the latter that Saroyan’s remark was made. By then, the young Ruby Cohn was already familiar with the play. She writes, “Having read nothing by Beckett, I fell in love with his En attendant Godot in 1953, when it was performed at the short-lived Théâtre de Babylone in Paris.