On October 23, 1969, the telephone rang in the room of the Tunisian hotel where Samuel Beckett and his partner, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, were on vacation. She answered, and a spokesperson for the Swedish Academy informed her that her husband, the author of such acclaimed plays as Waiting for Godot (1952) and Endgame (1955), had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. "What a catastrophe!" he exclaimed. With these two words, he summarized the discomfort with which Beckett lived the award: he did not go to Stockholm to collect it, he did not keep the financial compensation, nor did he allow himself to write anything for a good while, until the world had managed to forget that his work had deserved such a prestigious distinction.