Martin Esslin: The Theatre of the Absurd (1961–)

“In 1953 Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents – Beckett, Adamov, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others – shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his ground-breaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.

Over five decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.”

First published by Anchor Books, 1961
Second edition first published by Pelican Books, 1968
Third edition first published by Pelican Books, 1980

Review (Lionel Abel, Partisan Review, Summer 1962, pp 454-459)

Publisher

Esslin’s article preceding the book (The Tulane Drama Review 4:4, May 1960)
PDF (1961 Anchor Books edition, 20 MB, no OCR, added 2014-5-3)
multiple formats (1972 Pelican Books reprint of the second edition [1968], 463 pp, at Archive.org)
PDF (1991 Penguin Books reprint of the third edition [1980], 480 pp, 58 MB, no OCR)