'A lifetime of happiness! No man alive. could bear it: it would be hell on earth'
After the death of her father, Ann Whitefield becomes the joint ward of two men: the respectable Roebuck Ramsden and John Tanner, author of 'The Revolutionist's Handbook'. Believing marriage would prevent him from achieving his higher intellectual and political ambi- tions, Tanner is horrified to discover that Ann intends to marry him, and he flees to Spain with the determined young woman in hot pursuit. The chase even leads them to the underworld, where the characters' alter egos discuss questions of human nature and philosophy in a lively debate in a scene often performed separately as 'Don Juan in Hell'. In Man and Superman, Shaw combined seriousness with comedy to create a satirical and buoyant exposé of the eternal struggle between the sexes. This is the definitive text produced under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume also includes Shaw's preface of 1903 and his appendix, 'The Revolutionist's Handbook', the cast list from the first production of Man and Superman and a list of his principal works.
George Bernard Shaw ( 26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation. He was the first person to be awarded a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award, receiving the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature and sharing the 1938 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film version of Pygmalion. Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1873, where he established himself as a writer and novelist. By the mid-1880s he was 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, 1894's Arms and the Man. 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.
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