Beckett's Happy Days: A Manuscript Study

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Softcover. Very Good. 6x0x9. [LITERATURE]. Gontarski, S. E. Illustrator: Sidney Chafetz. "Beckett's Happy Days: A Manuscript Study." Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. English language. Glossy softcover. Text with black and white illustration. 9 x 6 x 0.25 in. 23 x 15 x 0.75 cm. 6 oz. pp. xvii, 86. Front cover bows out. Dog-earring. Text clean. Very Good. ISBN: 9780814254028."Beckett’s Happy Days: A Manuscript Study by S. E. Gontarski traces the development of Samuel Beckett’s final two-act play, composed in English between October 1960 and May 1961, through annotated and bedoodled manuscript notebooks, holographs, and typescript drafts to the final published and performed text. The analysis details Beckett’s most salient alterations and revisions, including his development of the work’s tapestry of fragmented, half-remembered literary allusions. The current reissue of Beckett’s Happy Days comes at a timely moment not only in Beckett studies but also in the general growth in programs of book history and digital humanities. Gontarski’s study is not just a look back to origins. It traces an arc of research that developed over forty years as the Samuel Beckett archive at the University of Reading matured, as the fields of genetic and textual research grew, and as book history reemerged on a grand, international scale.