Bernard Shaw

To his own generation Bernard Shaw's greatest creation seemed to be himself. Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist and irresistible charmer, he was the most controversial literary figure of his age and the scourge of all that was most oppressive in late-Victorian England. In his writing and public speeches, he embodied the unfamiliar virtues of reason, sense and unanswerable good humor. And yet, as the opening volume of this masterly four-volume biography makes clear, Shaw's invention of this monumental figure was a paradoxical method of concealment and his way of coming to terms with a world that had abandoned him in childhood. - Jacket flap.