Samuel Beckett didn't often reveal his literary influences, yet his admiration for the writing of John Millington Synge is a matter of record. As Beckett's official biographer James Knowlson wrote in an early essay on the connections between Synge and Beckett: “[I]n answer to a somewhat bold question relating to the most profound influences that he himself acknowledged upon his dramatic writing, Beckett referred me specifically to the work of J. M. Synge. Such an acknowledgement is relatively rare with Beckett and the nature and extent of his debt is therefore all the more worth pursuing.” / There are numerous biographical similarities between the two writers. Both grew up in affluent upper-middle-class sections of south Co. Dublin; both had a strict Protestant religious upbringing under the direction of somewhat repressive mothers; both were students at Trinity College Dublin, an institution with which each had an ambiguous relationship; most importantly, both discovered their mature literary styles through an intensive engagement with a language other than English. Each writer even found a supportive interlocutor in the artist Jack Yeats, perhaps Ireland's most important modernist painter. Yet despite all of these points in common, Beckett's identification of Synge as a profound formal influence initially seems odd when one compares the texts each writer produced. Early works by Beckett such as More Pricks than Kicks and Murphy are remote in their concerns from the Revival, and demonstrate an anti-traditional aesthetic very much opposed to the conventions of Irish writing at the turn of the century.