"The Capital of the Ruins" is a short piece of reportage by Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

 written in 1946. Originally written for broadcast by Irish radio, it deals with the Irish hospital in St. Lô. The title of the piece derives from a booklet of photographs of the bombed-out city entitled St. Lô, Capital des Ruines, 5 et 7 Juin 1944.
The text is dated 10 June 1946 signed by Samuel Beckett, but there remains a controversy whether it was broadcast or not. It was discovered among the archives of Radio Telefís Éireann in 1983 and published in 1986 by Eoin O'Brien in The Beckett Country, and later that same year in As No Other Dare Fail: For Samuel Beckett on His 80th Birthday by His Friends and Admirers. It is also collected in Beckett's Complete Short Prose 1929-1989

The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 (Beckett)

The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989 is a collection which includes all of Samuel Beckett's works written in prose, with the exception of his novels, novellas, and More Pricks Than Kicks which is considered "as much a novel as a collection of stories". The book was edited by S. E. Gontarski and...

, published in 1995.