ABSTRACT
Several months ago, I received a letter from a professor in Virginia who pointed out that “1992 marks the 100th anniversary of modern drama in the English language.” The professor was organizing a conference and planned to present a paper on Shaw’s effect on American drama. He wondered if I had any thoughts on the subject. “As an educated American,” he wrote almost pleadingly, “you must be familiar with Shaw.” When I was a teacher, did I ever teach him? As a playwright, was I at all influenced by him? Did I have anything special I’d like to say about him now? The letter reminded me how much Shaw and his plays once permeated my consciousness, and how little I have thought about him in the last 10 or 15 years. He was, of course, a dominant literary figure during the first half of the century, receiving the Nobel Prize at the peak of his career in 1925. Still alive and writing when I was a child, he was invoked and referred to simply by his initials: G.B.S., like F.D.R. or M-G-M. I recall hearing him discussed at the dinner table with some irritation by my father, and with considerable appreciation by my mother. I also remember seeing him in a Movietone newsreel, clowning for the camera in front of his cottage at Ayot St. Lawrence in England on one of his birthdays —a spry old man with a twinkle in his eye. He died in 1950, when I was in college.
