So controversial was Black Girl when it first appeared in 1932 that it provoked public outcry with Shaw decried as a blasphemer. Today, it remains a surprisingly irreverent depiction of the universal search for God. Dissatisfied with the teachings of respectable white missionaries, an African girl embarks upon her own quest for God and Truth. Journeying through the forest, she encounters various religious figures, each one seeking to convert her to their own brand of faith. This brilliantly sardonic allegory showcases some of Shaw's most unorthodox thoughts on religion and race. George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is best known for his dramatic works, of which Pygmalion is the most famous.

The love story between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy—in their own words The English novelist and screenwriter Christopher Isherwood was already famous as the author of Goodbye to Berlin when he met Don Bachardy, a California teenager, on the beach in Santa Monica in 1952. Within a year, they began to live together as an openly gay couple, defying convention in the closeted world of Hollywood. Isherwood was forty-eight; Bachardy was eighteen. The Animals is the testimony in letters to their extraordinary partnership, which lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986—despite the thirty year age gap, affairs and jealousy (on both sides), the pressures of increasing celebrity, and the disdain of twentieth-century America for love between two men. The letters reveal the private world of the Animals: Isherwood was "Dobbin," a stubborn old workhorse; Bachardy was the rash, playful "Kitty." Isherwood had a gift for creating a safe and separate domestic milieu, necessary for a gay man in midtwentieth-century America. He drew Bachardy into his semi-secret realm, nourished Bachardy's talent as a painter, and launched him into the artistic career that was first to threaten and eventually to secure their life together. The letters also tell of public achievements—the critical acclaim for A Single Man, the commercial success of Cabaret—and the bohemian whirl of friendships in Los Angeles, London, and New York with such stars as Truman Capote, Julie Harris, David Hockney, Vanessa Redgrave, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. Bold, transgressive, and playful, The Animals articulates the devotion, in tenderness and in storms, between two uniquely original spirits.

George Bernard Shaw's frequently stormy but always creative relationship with the British Broadcasting Corporation was in large part responsible for making him a household name on both sides of the Atlantic. From the founding of the BBC in 1922 to his death in 1950, Shaw supported the BBC by participating in debates, giving talks, permitting radio and television broadcasts of many of his plays - even advising on pronunciation questions. Here, for the first time, Leonard Conolly illuminates the often grudging, though usually mutually beneficial, relationship between two of the twentieth century's cultural giants. Drawing on extensive archival materials held in England, the United States, and Canada, Bernard Shaw and the BBC presents a vivid portrait of many contentious issues negotiated between Shaw and the public broadcaster. This is a fascinating study of how controversial works were first performed in both radio and television's infancies. It details debates about freedom of speech, the editing of plays for broadcast, and the protection of authors' rights to control and profit from works performed for radio and television broadcasts. Conolly also scrutinizes Second World War-era censorship, when the British government banned Shaw from making any broadcasts that questioned British policies or strategies. Rich in detail and brimming with Shaw's irrepressible wit, this book also provides links to online appendices of Shaw's broadcasts for the BBC, texts of Shaw's major BBC talks, extracts from German wartime propaganda broadcasts about Shaw, and the BBC's obituaries for Shaw.

This book reveals the genuity of Shaw's totalitarianism by looking at his material - articles, speeches, letters, etc but is especially concerned with analyzing the utopian desire that runs through so many of Shaw's plays; looking at his political and eugenic utopianism as expressed in his drama and comparing this to his political totalitarianism.

This book investigates how, alongside Beatrice Webb’s ground-breaking pre-World War One anti-poverty campaigns, George Bernard Shaw helped launch the public debate about the relationship between equality, redistribution and democracy in a developed economy. The ten years following his great 1905 play on poverty Major Barbara present a puzzle to Shaw scholars, who have hitherto failed to appreciate both the centrality of the idea of equality in major plays like Getting Married, Misalliance, and Pygmalion, and to understand that his major political work, 1928’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism had its roots in this period before the Great War. As both the era’s leading dramatist and leader of the Fabian Society, Shaw proposed his radical postulate of equal incomes as a solution to those twin scourges of a modern industrial society: poverty and inequality. Set against the backdrop of Beatrice Webb’s famous Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law 1905-1909 – a publication which led to grass-roots campaigns against destitution and eventually the Welfare State – this book considers how Shaw worked with Fabian colleagues, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and H. G. Wells to explore through a series of major lectures, prefaces and plays, the social, economic, political, and even religious implications of human equality as the basis for modern democracy.