If you are very famous, it’s safe to assume that your letters will someday be published. Under the circumstances, they may have been written with at least one eye flirting with posterity, meaning a conscious aim at being publishable as literature. But if you are also modest, you will write simply and directly for the addressee alone, with no thought of literary effect. Yet even then, given who you are, you may still produce missives of historical, philosophical, psychological, and, however unintended, autobiographical interest.

Let me say of Samuel Beckett that, to his credit, his correspondence exhibits no such intellectual coquetry. The Letters of Samuel Beckett—in four hefty volumes, of which the fourth still awaits publication and the third is just out—are totally spontaneous and unpretentiously intended only for their recipients.1 Anything beyond that is purely coincidental. This is their appeal or, as some might feel, their limitation.

The four-volume project by four editors is almost superhumanly dedicated, as the third volume formidably attests. These letters, from 1957 to 1965, in a tome of 771 pages, are part of the most extensive and rigorous editing of a correspondence I have ever encountered, carrying thoroughness to extraordinary, arguably obsessive, extremes.

George Craig is in charge of translations from the French and other French matters, which he discusses in his particular introduction. The apparent chief editor, Dan Gunn, offers introductory matter of the most comprehensive sort and is probably responsible for the majority of the