In the five novels he wrote before he became the great Irish playwright everyone knows, George Bernard Shaw worked out the basic design of his public future, fulfilling his own dictum that "no man is real until he has been transmuted into a work of art." R.F. Dietrich stresses Shaw's psychic transformation from a shy, priggish, inept Shelleyan intellectual to an efficient, extroverted, ironically devilish statesman-poet. Amid the decay and death of...