Bair, Deirdre, Samuel Beckett: A Biography, Jonathan Cape, 1978.

Bair's was the first biography of Beckett, written years before he died, but in many ways it is the most readable.

Farrow, Anthony, Early Beckett: Art and Allusion in "More Pricks than Kicks" and "Murphy," Whitston Publishing Company, 1991.

This very academic study details in great specificity the sources of the allusions of Beckett's two earliest books.

Gontarski, S. E., ed., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, Grove Press, 1986.

This collection, edited by Gontarski—an important scholar of modernism and of modernist drama in particular—is probably the best introduction to the different kinds of writing on Beckett.

Kenner, Hugh, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, University of California Press, 1961.

Kenner's writing on modernism is both encyclopedic and idiosyncratic. In his early career, he was the first academic critic to devote whole studies to writers such as Beckett and...