Dream of Fair To Middling Women

Dream of Fair to Middling Women is Samuel Beckett’s first novel. Written in English "in a matter of weeks" in 1932 when Beckett was only 26 and living in Paris, the clearly autobiographical novel was rejected by publishers and shelved by the author. It was eventually published in 1992, three years after the author's death. The main character Belacqua, a writer and teacher, is very similar to Beckett himself, though a character named "Mr. Beckett" also makes an appearance in the book.

The prose of Samuel Beckett
Novels:
  • Dream of Fair to Middling Women
  • Murphy
  • Watt
  • Mercier and Camier
  • Molloy
  • Malone Dies
  • The Unnamable
  • How It Is
Short stories:
  • “Assumption”
  • “Sedendo et Quiescendo”
  • “Text”
  • “A Case in a Thousand”
  • “First Love”
  • “The Expelled”
  • “The Calmative”
  • “The End”
  • “Texts for Nothing”
  • “From an Abandoned Work”
  • “The Image”
  • “All Strange Away”
  • “Imagination Dead Imagine”
  • “Enough”
  • “Ping”
  • “Lessness”
  • “The Lost Ones”
  • “Fizzles”
  • “Heard in the Dark 1”
  • “Heard in the Dark 2”
  • “One Evening”
  • “As the story was told”
  • “The Cliff”
  • “neither”
  • “Stirrings Still”
  • “Company”
  • “Ill Seen Ill Said”
  • “Worstward Ho”
Short story collections:
  • More Pricks Than Kicks
  • Stories and Texts for Nothing
  • The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989
Non-fiction:
  • Three Dialogues (with Georges Duthuit and Jacques Putnam)
  • Disjecta
  • Proust
  • "The Capital of the Ruins"

Famous quotes containing the words dream of, dream, fair, middling and/or women:

    “When I think of the gold-diggers and the Mormons, the slaves and the slave-holders and the flibustiers, I naturally dream of a glorious private life. No, I am not patriotic.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child- nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.”
    —Albert Camus (1913–1960)

    “A man who would woo a fair maid,
    Should ‘prentice himself to the trade;
    And study all day,
    In methodical way,
    How to flatter, cajole, and persuade”
    —Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)

    “I heard what was said of the universe,
    Heard it and heard it of several thousand years;
    It is middling well as far as it goes—but is that all?”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1882)

    “The only human beings I have thoroughly admired and respected in the world have been those who carried the load of the world with a smile, and who, in the face of anxieties that would have knocked me clean out, never showed a tremor. Such men and women end by owning us, soul and body, and our allegiance can never be shaken. We are only too glad to be owned. Religion is nothing but this.”
    —Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)