Beckett spent the war years in hiding as a French farm worker.

Evidence

In 1942, as a member of a resistance group in France, he narrowly escaped being arrested by the Gestapo, and lived as a farm worker in an isolated mountain village in the south of France until the country was liberated. In 1953, after nearly twenty-five years of literary activity, he made his breakthrough with Waiting for Godot. For him, the play was a side-product of his real work, which at that point was his trilogy of novels. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2239

Categorization

• XREF: Bio detail connects to Beckett’s own wartime experience and the biographical shaping of his famously barren aesthetic.