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Major Barbara

Author George Bernard Shaw

Introduction by Margery Morgan

Edited by Dan H. Laurence

Paperback

$13.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Classics

5.13"W x 7.8"H x 0.44"D | 5 oz | 104 per carton

On sale May 01, 2001 | 176 Pages | 9780140437904

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Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of one of Shaw’s most forward-looking plays—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library

A Penguin Classic

Andrew Undershaft, a millionaire armaments dealer, loves money and despises poverty. His estranged daughter Barbara, on the other hand, shows her love for the poor by throwing her energies into her work as a major in the Salvation Army, and sees her father as another soul to be saved. But when the Army needs funds to keep going, it is Undershaft who saves the day with a large check—forcing Barbara to examine her moral assumptions. Are they right to accept money that has been obtained by “Death and Destruction”? Full of lively comedy and sparkling debate, Major Barbara brilliantly tests the tensions between religion, wealth and power, benevolence and equality, and metaphors and realities of war.

This is the definitive text under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. This volume includes Shaw’s preface of 1906, the cast list from the first production of Major Barbara, and a list of his principal works.

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. View titles by George Bernard Shaw

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By the Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

“[Shaw] did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity.” —Thomas Mann

“Shaw will not allow complacency; he hates second-hand opinions; he attacks fashion; he continually challenges and unsettles, questioning and provoking us even when he is making us laugh. And he is still at it. No cliché or truism of contemporary life is safe from him.” —Michael Holroyd

“In his works Shaw left us his mind. . . . Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense.” —The Sunday Times

“He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr. Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.” —The Independent

“His plays were superb exercises in high-level argument on every issue under the sun, from feminism and God, to war and eternity, but they were also hits—and still are.” —The Daily Mail

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