To the Editors of The Crimson:
News analyst Peter Shapiro, who alleges that he was a student in English 166, writes in The Crimson (2/8/74) that Samuel Beckett is an "English-born absurdist writer."
I should be very surprised to find out that Mr. Shapiro had read much by or about this author. Beckett was, of course, born in 1906 in Ireland (Foxrock, County Dublin) and educated at Trinity College before he departed for France. If one wished to take a colonialist point of view one might possibly say that Beckett was born in the then United Kingdom, or even in the so-called British Isles.
But in no sense can even the most Anglo-Irish of Dublin suburbs be geographically defined as England. All of which leads me to suspect that Mr. Shapiro is trying to explain away his lack of preparation for any exam on modern fiction by his rehashing of this most recent Harvard molehill. Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. Tutor in Eliot House
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