Books: G. B. S. Revisited

BERNARD SHAW (628 pp.)—St. John Ervlne—Morrow ($7.50).

Writing a Bernard Shaw biography is perhaps the most inviting and yet the most thankless task in the literary game, because all his life Shaw wrote his own. He was the most articulate, most relentlessly self-documenting man of his time. The publication of yet another book about G.B.S., therefore, seems both foolhardy and unnecessary. But this one is timely, for it comes at a moment when pygmy critics are beginning to kick the dead giant around (TIME, Aug. 13). Irish Dramatist St. John Ervine suggests both why...