Homage to Beckett: A Symposium

Speakers:  Dr. Jay Levy ’60 HON ’96

    Lois Overbeck, PhD, Managing Editor, The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett, Emory University

    Michael Meere, PhD, Assistant Professor of French, Wesleyan University

Thursday, October 24, 2019, 3-6 p.m., followed by a reception

Smith Reading Room, Olin Library, 252 Church St., Middletown

Join us for Homage to Samuel Beckett, a symposium celebrating the recent gift of Beckett letters and books by Dr. Jay ‘60 HON ’96 and Sharon Levy.  Dr. Levy has been a leader in AIDS research starting with his independent discovery of the AIDS virus, HIV, in 1983.  At Wesleyan, in addition to his biology major, he had an intense interest in the theater of the absurd, and he wrote a paper about Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  Shortly after graduating, Jay Levy had a Fulbright in Paris, and he wrote to Beckett.  Beckett responded, and a decades long friendship developed.  Speakers will explore Samuel Beckett as a friend and correspondent, a prolific letter writer, and a literary figure for whom letters were an important mode of expression.  Free and open to the public.