Arms and the Man - Couverture souple

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is one of the world’s greatest literary figures. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he left school at fourteen and in 1876 went to London, where he began his literary career with a series of unsuccessful novels. In 1884 he became a founder of the Fabian Society, the famous British socialist organization. After becoming a reviewer and drama critic, he published a study of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1891 and became determined to create plays as he felt Ibsen did: to shake audiences out of their moral complacency and to attack social problems. However, Shaw was an irrepressible wit, and his plays are as entertaining as they are socially provocative. Basically shy, Shaw created a public persona for himself: G.B.S., a bearded eccentric, crusading social critic, antivivisectionist, language reformer, strict vegetarian, and renowned public speaker. The author of fifty-three plays, hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, and several books, Shaw is best known for Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

Rodelle Weintraub is a writer, an editor, and an educator specializing in the works of George Bernard Shaw. The Weintraub Center for the Study of the Arts and Humanities at the West Chester University of Pennsylvania was endowed by Weintraub and her husband, award-winning author Stanley Weintraub, in 1982. She lives in Newark, Delaware.

Arms and the Man, optimistic, farcical, absurd, and teeming with sexual energy, has Shaw inverting the devices of melodrama to glorious effect.