Samuel Beckett's first novel and "literary landmark" ("St. Petersburg Times"), "
Dream of Fair to Middling Women" is a wonderfully savory introduction to the Nob
el Prize-winning author. Written in the summer of 1932, when the twenty-six-year
-old Beckett was poor and struggling to make ends meet, the novel offers a rare
and revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. Later on, Beckett would cal
l the novel "the chest into which I threw all my wild thoughts." When he submitt
ed it to several publishers, all of them found it too literary, too scandalous,
or too risky; it was never published during his lifetime.
