Saint Joan by Bernard Shaw

Karsh of Ottawa

Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, of Protestant stock, in 1856, and died at Ayot St. Lawrence, Herts, in 1950.

After a false start in XIX-century fashion as a novelist, he made a reputation as a journalist-critic of books, pictures, music and the drama.

Meanwhile he had plunged into the Socialist revival of the eighteen-eighties and come out as one of the leaders who made the Fabian Society famous, figuring prominently not only as a pamphleteer and platform orator, but as a serious economist and philosopher, publishing major essays on Ibsen and Wagner.

Shaw broke out in a new direction in 1892 as a playwright, although it was not until some twelve years later that the opposition he had always to face at first was overcome sufficiently to establish him as an irresistible force in the theatre.

The present volumes show him in all the phases of his varied career, and can be read for aesthetic entertainment, for up-to-date liberal education, for philosophic and biological doctrine, even for pure fun, or for any or all of them, written in plain English by a born master of that most enchanting of modern scriptures.

Not to have read Shaw is to be behind the times as far as he was always before them.