Samuel Beckett, were private and had no literary value. But Joycean scholars, Fromm notes, "maintained that any and all mate- rial about great writers like Joyce and Beckett belonged to the world, not the family." In fact, she recalls indignantly, when Stephen Joyce said that Beckett had told him to destroy the letters, Beckett's biographer Deirdre Bair "flatly insisted that Beckett had not meant what he said."
"If the sanctity of private life and the in- dividual is rejected...