Who wrote the play Waiting for Godot?

Samuel Beckett, who wrote it in French first and translated it into English himself - he said writing in a second language made it easier to write without style, which was the point. Two men wait for someone who does not come, twice.

It failed and then it did not. Early audiences walked out; a famous review said nothing happens, twice. Then it was staged in 1957 at San Quentin prison for an audience of fourteen hundred convicts, who were expected to riot and instead understood it immediately - a play about waiting, performed to men with nothing but time. That performance is often given as the moment its reputation turned.

Beckett refused to explain it, and was consistent about refusing. Asked who Godot was, he said if he had known he would have said so in the play. He fought productions that tried to fix an interpretation, and his estate has continued to - including blocking all-female casts, which has produced court cases in Italy and elsewhere. He had also served in the French Resistance, been forced into hiding when his cell was betrayed, and spent the rest of the war as a farm labourer in Vaucluse, which is where he began writing the kind of thing he became known for.