The Works of George Bernard Shaw: [Including Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, Major Barbara, The Doctor’s Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra].

SHAW, George Bernard.

Item Number: 103475

New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1930-32.

The collected works of Nobel Prize-winning author George Bernard Shaw. Octavo, 30 volumes, bound in full leather, gilt titles and tooling to the spine, gilt tooling to the front and rear panels, top edge gilt, marbled endpapers, frontispieces. In fine condition. An exceptional set.

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.