GBS and the USA: The Beginnings of the Beginning

The beginning of Shaw's serious engagement with America and Americans is normally associated with Richard Mansfield's production of Arms and the Man at New York's Herald Square Theatre on 17 September 1894. While it is true, as one of Mansfield's biographers put it, that prior to Mansfield's Arms and the Man Shaw was merely "a small speck on the horizon" for most Americans, a reexamination of several secondary sources and new evidence from previously unexplored manuscript sources reveal that Shaw's interest in America had started to take shape long before 1894. This article argues that Shaw's early encounters with American social and political values laid the foundation for his subsequent and frequent condemnations of American society.