Samuel Beckett a towering figure in drama and fiction who altered the course of contemporary theater, died in Paris on Friday at the age of 83. He died of respiratory problems in a Paris hospital, where he had been moved from a nursing home. He was buried yesterday at the Montparnasse cemetery after a private funeral. Explaining the secrecy surrounding his illness, hospitalization and death, Irene Lindon, representing the author's Paris publisher, Editions de Minuit, said it was ''what he would have wanted.'' Beckett's plays became the cornerstone of 20th-century theater beginning with ''Waiting for Godot,'' which was first produced in 1953. As the play's two tramps wait for a salvation that never comes, they exchange vaudeville routines and metaphysical musings - and comedy rises to tragedy. Before Beckett there was a naturalistic tradition. After him, scores of playwrights were encouraged to experiment with the underlying meaning of their work as well as with an absurdist style. As the Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn wrote: ''After 'Godot,' plots could be minimal; exposition, expendable; characters, contradictory; settings, unlocalized, and dialogue, unpredictable. Blatant farce could jostle tragedy.'' At the same time, his novels, in particular his trilogy, ''Molloy,'' ''Malone Dies'' and ''The Unnamable,'' inspired by James Joyce, move subliminally into the minds of the characters. The novels are among the most experimental and most profound in Western literature. For his accomplishments in both drama and fiction, the Irish author, who wrote first in English and later in French, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man's relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism, as illustrated by the final words of his novel, ''The Unnamable'': ''You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.'' Or as he wrote in ''Worstward Ho,'' one of his later works of fiction: ''Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'' Though his name in the adjectival form, Beckettian, entered the English language as a synonym for bleakness, he was a man of great humor and compassion, in his life as in his work. He was a tragicomic playwright whose art was consistently instilled with mordant wit. As scholars and critics scrutinized his writing for metaphor and ulterior meaning, he refrained from all analysis or even explanation. As he wrote to his favorite director, Alan Schneider: ''If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin.'' When Mr. Schneider rashly asked Beckett who Godot was, the playwright answered, ''If I knew, I would have said so in the play.'' His greatest successes were in his middle years, in the 1950's with ''Waiting for Godot'' and ''Endgame,'' and with his trilogy of novels. It was suggested that for an artist of his stature, he had a relatively small body of work - but only if one measures size by number of words. Distilling his art to its essence, he produced scores of eloquent plays and stories, many of those in his later years not strictly defined as full length. But in terms of the intensity of the imagery, plays like ''Not I,'' ''Footfalls'' and ''Rockaby'' were complete visions. He wrote six novels, four long plays and dozens of shorter ones, volumes of stories and narrative fragments, some of which were short novels. He wrote poetry and essays on the arts, including an essay about Marcel Proust (one of his particular favorites), radio and television plays, and prose pieces he called residua and disjecta. In his 80's, he became an icon of survival. Even as he vowed that he had nothing more to say, he continued to be tormented and sustained by midnight thoughts and nightmarish images. Having discovered what was for him the non-meaning of life and its brevity (man is, he observed in ''Waiting for Godot,'' ''born astride the grave''), he never stopped looking for ways to express himself. Once in writing about painting he said, ''There is nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.'' For him, that obligation was ineluctable. Despite his artistic reputation, his ascension was slow and for many years discouraging. He labored in his own darkness and disillusionment, the equivalent of one of the isolated metaphorical worlds inhabited by his characters. When his work began to be published and produced, he was plagued by philistinism, especially with ''Waiting for Godot,'' which puzzled and outraged many theatergoers and critics, some of whom regarded it as a travesty if not a hoax. From the first he had his ardent supporters, who included, notably, Jean Anouilh, the bellwether of French theatrical tradition. He greeted ''Godot'' at its premiere in Paris as ''a masterpiece that will cause despair for men in general and for playwrights in particular.'' In both respects, Anouilh proved prescient. Today ''Godot'' is generally accepted as a cornerstone of modern theater. It is performed worldwide in schools and prisons as well as on public stages and, in its Grove Press edition, is a perennial best seller. With ''Godot'' and his other plays, Beckett influenced countless playwrights who followed him, including Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet. For more than 50 years the writer lived in his adopted city of Paris, for much of that time in a working-class district in Montparnasse - a move that was to have the greatest effect on his life. Though he wrote most of his work in French, he remained definably Irish in his voice, manner and humor. Even in his final years, when he lived in a nursing home in Paris, he joined friends in a sip of Irish whisky, which seemed to warm his bones and open him to greater conviviality. Throughout his life he was as craggy and as erect as a Giacometti sculpture. When he was healthy, he took long, loping walks on Paris streets. In no way could he ever be considered an optimist. In an often repeated story, on a glorious sunny day he walked jauntily through a London park with an old friend and exuded a feeling of joy. The friend said it was the kind of day that made one glad to be alive. Beckett responded, ''I wouldn't go that far.'' Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, a suburb of Dublin, on Good Friday, April 13, 1906 (that date is sometimes disputed; it is said that on his birth certificate the date is May 13). His father, William Beckett Jr., was a surveyor. His mother, Mary Roe Beckett (known as May), was a nurse before her marriage. Samuel and his older brother, Frank, were brought up as Protestants. They went to Earlsfort House School in Dublin. Samuel Beckett then continued his education at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he majored in French and Italian. At school he excelled both in his studies and in sports, playing cricket and rugby. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1927 and his Master of Arts degree in 1931. In the intervening time, he spent two years in Paris in an exchange program, lecturing on English at the Ecole Normale Superieure. In Paris, he met James Joyce and other members of the literary and artistic set. He was not, as is commonly thought, Joyce's secretary, but he became a close friend and aide, reading to him when Joyce's eyes began to fail. Beckett's first published work was an essay on Joyce that appeared in the collection ''Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress,'' the work in progress being Joyce's ''Finnegans Wake.'' His first poem, ''Whoroscope,'' was printed in 1930, followed one year later by his essay on Proust. Returning to Ireland, he taught Romance languages at Trinity. He thought briefly about remaining in the academic profession but decided otherwise. He resigned abruptly in 1932 and left Ireland, returning only for annual visits to his mother. (His father died in 1933, his mother in 1950.) He wandered from England to France to Germany before moving to Paris permanently in 1937. By that time he had published ''More Pricks Than Kicks,'' a collection of short stories; ''Echo's Bones,'' a volume of poetry, and ''Murphy,'' his first novel. Written in English, as were all his works at the time, ''Murphy'' was about an Irishman in London who tries to remove himself gradually from the visible world. Settling down in Paris, Beckett became a familiar figure at Left Bank cafes, continuing his alliance with Joyce while also becoming friends with artists like Marcel Duchamp (with whom he played chess) and Alberto Giacometti. At this time he became involved with Peggy Guggenheim, who nicknamed him Oblomov after the title character in the Ivan Goncharov novel, a man who Miss Guggenheim said was so overcome by apathy that he ''finally did not even have the willpower to get out of bed.'' In 1938, while walking with friends on a Paris street, he was stabbed with a knife by a panhandler. A young piano student named Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil came to his rescue and telephoned for an ambulance. One of his lungs was perforated and the knife narrowly missed his heart. Beckett fully recovered from the wound but it left psychological scars. After he recovered, he visited his assailant in prison and asked him the reason for the assault. The man replied, ''Je ne sais pas, Monsieur.'' More than ever, Beckett became aware of the randomness of life. The episode had one other long-ranging effect: He began a lifelong relationship with Miss Deschevaux-Dumesnil, whom he married in Folkestone, England, in 1961. With her, he chose to remain in France during World War II rather than return to the safety of Ireland. Both became active in the French Resistance. Forced to flee Paris, the couple went to Roussillon near the Spanish border. While working as a farm laborer and running messages for the Resistance, Beckett wrote the novel ''Watt.'' It was often said that his experiences in hiding during the war were an inspiration for ''Waiting for Godot'' and for the novel ''Mercier and Camier.'' At the end of the war he worked at the Irish Red Cross field hospital in St.-Lo. For his heroic services he was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de Resistance. After ''Watt,'' he began writing in French, which allowed him, as the Joyce biographer Richard Ellman observed, ''a private liberation from the English tradition.'' The five years starting in 1947 were his most intense creative period, producing most of his major work. That year he wrote his first play, ''Eleutheria,'' and began the novel ''Molloy.'' They were followed by ''Waiting for Godot,'' which he wrote in longhand in a composition book. It took him four months. In a little more than a year he had finished his greatest play as well as the first two parts of his trilogy of novels (''Molloy'' and ''Malone Dies''). Though he found a publisher for the trilogy (Jerome Lindon at Editions de Minuit, who remained his French publisher for the rest of his life), the plays were more difficult to place. Miss Deschevaux-Dumesnil took them from producer to producer, a thankless route that the playwright once compared to giving the plays to a concierge. Then Roger Blin, the French actor and director, agreed to present one. He chose ''Godot'' over ''Eleutheria'' partly because it had fewer characters. At Beckett's behest, ''Eleutheria'' was never produced in his lifetime. It was only when ''Waiting for Godot'' was in rehearsal, with Beckett in attendance, that Blin fully realized the excitement of his discovery. ''En Attendant Godot,'' as the play was titled, opened on Jan. 5, 1953, at the Theatre de Babylone, and, beginning a lifetime practice, the author did not attend. The first review, written by Sylvain Zegel in La Liberation, said Beckett was ''one of today's best playwrights,'' a fact that was not universally acknowledged. The first London production, using the playwright's English translation and directed by Peter Hall, received generally dismissive daily reviews. It was rescued by Harold Hobson, then the drama critic of The Sunday Times in London, who said the play might ''securely lodge in a corner of your mind as long as you live.'' In January 1956, Michael Myerberg opened the first United States production at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, with Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell cast in the leading roles as those Beckett tramps, Estragon and Vladimir. Expecting a Bert Lahr comedy, the audience was mystified. As Alan Schneider, the director of that original production, said, doing ''Godot'' in Miami was like dancing ''Giselle'' in Roseland. With both the director and Mr. Ewell replaced, the play moved to Broadway in April. With the exception of Eric Bentley and a few others, the critics were confounded. Several were abusive. Despite the producer's vainglorious advertising campaign to draw intellectuals into the theater, the play closed after 59 performances. That ''Waiting for Godot'' became a contemporary classic can be attributed to the enthusiasm of its champions and to the profundity of the work itself, which became more apparent with subsequent productions. ''Godot'' came to be regarded not only as a clown comedy with tragic dimensions but as a play about man coping with the nature of his existence in a world that appeared to be hurtling toward a self-induced apocalypse. Before ''Godot'' was produced in London, Beckett completed a second play, ''Fin de Partie,'' or ''Endgame,'' as the title was translated. In this dramatic equivalent of chess, Hamm the master oppresses Clov the servant in a bunker looking out on the void of the world. ''Endgame'' was followed by the radio play ''All That Fall'' and by the monodrama ''Krapp's Last Tape,'' written for the actor Patrick Magee. In 1961 after he and Miss Deschevaux-Dumesnil were married, he finished ''Happy Days,'' about a long and not always happy marriage, in which a woman is buried up to her neck in earth. In 1964 he made his only trip to the United States for the filming of ''Film,'' the short Beckett movie that Mr. Schneider made with Buster Keaton. Uncomfortable in the hot July weather in New York, he was eager to return to Paris. About the same time, he wrote a number of stage, television and radio plays, including ''Play'' (in which three characters are encased in urns), ''Cascando'' and ''Eh Joe,'' as well as the narrative fragment ''Imagination Dead Imagine.'' In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for a body of work that ''has transformed the destitution of man into his exaltation.'' Karl Ragnar Gierow, secretary of the Swedish Academy, said his writing ''rises like a Miserere from all mankind, its muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed and comfort to those in need.'' He was on holiday in Morocco at the time of the Nobel announcement and in characteristic fashion offered no public statement and refused to attend the ceremony. He sent his publisher in his stead. Reportedly he gave his prize money of $72,800 to needy artists. As undeterred by the acclaim as he had been by his years of obscurity, he continued to write and to maintain his privacy. His plays and prose became shorter and even terser, as in ''Not I,'' in which the play's principal character is a woman's heavily lipsticked mouth; ''That Time,'' in which a spotlight shines on a man's head and his corona of white hair, and ''Rockaby,'' in which an old woman rocks herself to death. In these plays he chose to deal with what he called ''the battle of the soliloquy,'' sifting the past and enduring the continuum of life. Two of his prose pieces, ''Company'' and ''Worstward Ho,'' were published as short novels. On occasion he would visit London to supervise a production or Germany, where he frequently worked on television plays and where he staged a definitive German-language version of ''Waiting for Godot.'' During Beckett's lifetime he had many close collaborations with actors (Jack MacGowran, Patrick Magee, Billie Whitelaw, David Warrilow) and with several directors, especially with Mr. Schneider, who staged most of the American premieres of his plays. When Mr. Schneider was killed in a London traffic accident in 1984, it was a blow for the playwright. In the same year, the New York Drama Critics Circle awarded him a special citation in recognition of his body of work and in particular for two evenings of Beckett short plays produced that season in New York. One of those plays was ''Catastrophe,'' written for Vaclav Havel. It was for Beckett a rare political work about the interrogation of a dissident. In Beckett's later years, directors staged his radio plays or adapted his prose to the stage. Mabou Mines offered dramatizations of ''The Lost Ones,'' ''Mercier and Camier'' and ''Company.'' Though Beckett was liberal about allowing adaptations of his prose, he was scrupulous in demanding absolute fidelity to the stage directions as well as to the dialogue in his plays. In 1985, JoAnne Akalaitis, a director with Mabou Mines, changed the setting of ''Endgame'' from a bare interior to an abandoned subway station. Through representatives, Beckett issued a formal complaint against the production at the American Repertory Theater in Boston, and his objection appeared in the play's program. On his 80th birthday in 1986, Beckett was celebrated in several cities. In Paris there was a citywide festival of plays and symposiums and in New York there was a week of panels and lectures analyzing his art. As usual, he kept his silence, as in the characteristic note he sent to those who approached him about writing his biography. He said that his life was ''devoid of interest.'' He steadfastly maintained his routine through his later years. He lived on the Boulevard St. Jacques in an apartment adjoining that of his wife and overlooking the exercise yard of the Sante prison. Periodically he visited his country house, some 60 miles outside Paris. He made daily trips to a neighborhood cafe where he met friends, had a double espresso and smoked several of his thin dark cigarettes. Periodically he wrote brief plays and small prose pieces. Around him and without his encouragement, his reputation grew unbounded. The Mike Nichols revival of ''Waiting for Godot'' at Lincoln Center in 1988 was an event of magnitude, drawing together the diverse talents of Steve Martin, Robin Williams and Bill Irwin and selling out for its entire engagement. This year there was a festival of Beckett radio plays on National Public Radio, reminding his audience that this was still another form that he had mastered. About a year ago, after falling in his apartment, he moved to a nearby nursing home, where he continued to receive visitors. He lived his last year in a small, barely furnished room. He had a television set on which he continued to watch major tennis and soccer events, and several books, including his boyhood copy of Dante's ''Divine Comedy'' in Italian. On July 17 this year, his wife died and he left the nursing home to attend the funeral. Late this year, after he became ill, he was moved to a hospital. There are no immediate survivors. His last work to be printed in his lifetime was ''Stirrings Still,'' a short prose piece published in a limited edition on his 83d birthday. In it, a character who resembles the author sits alone in a cell-like room until he sees his double appear - and then disappear. Accompanied by ''time and grief and self so-called,'' he finds himself ''stirring still'' to the end. Most of Samuel Beckett's plays and fiction are published in the United States by Grove Press and in France by Editions de Minuit of Paris. In Britain most of his plays have been published by Faber & Faber and his fiction by John Calder. These are among his principal works: