This book was published by The Saturday Review of Literature in honor of Shaw’s 90th birthday in July 1946. Shaw, at this point, was a living legend; the list of contributors on the cover was a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the day’s intellectual and political leadership, including Sir Max Beerbohm, Aldous Huxley, W.R. Inge, J.B. Priestley, and H.G. Wells.

When Shaw died four years later, the world mourned. Statesmen from Pandit Nehru to Harry Truman offered tribute, and Shaw’s literary compatriots remembered him as a courageous playwright, a wit, and a reform-minded prophet. Yet 60 years after his death, Shaw’s star has faded. Although his plays still enchant audiences, as Brook Allen wrote in a 1993 article in The New Criterion, “one by one, the mainstays of Shaw’s worldview—the Fabian creed of ‘permeation,’ eventually his Stalinism, his faith in ‘Creative Evolution’ and the ‘Life Force’—have been toppled.” Shaw’s impatience with the snail’s pace of Fabian political progress led him, later in life, to support men like Mussolini and Stalin, who, in his mind, had the strength and character to change the world. In 1931, in the midst of the Stalinist terror, Shaw visited the Soviet Union, where he professed, bizarrely, to have found ‘religion.’ In light of more recent history, those views, once thought of as charmingly eccentric, have come to seem false and dangerous.