The goal of the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project is to bring together information on the correspondence of Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), providing access to primary sources now scattered in archives and private collections worldwide. Through the research of the Beckett Letters Project, students, scholars, critics and theater artists can trace the evolution of Beckett’s work with increased insight into his choices as a writer.
Since 1990, students have been involved at each stage of the Letters of Samuel Beckett Project at Emory, from preparing the four volume edition published in 2009-2016 by Cambridge University Press, to the development of its newly released metadata website, Chercher. The Cambridge edition only published about 2500 letters selected from over 16,000 letters consulted, so the project developed the open-access website to provide access to those letters in public archives. Chercher combines a Location Register and index to Beckett’s letters in public archives around the world. Its purpose is to make Beckett’s Letters accessible to future scholars and students.
As we prepare the research files of The Letters of Samuel Beckett for deposit in the Rose Library, where new generations of scholars and students will have access to them, we continue to engage students to help us establish inventories of the files and facilitate cataloguing of the papers.
