In the climactic final scene of George Bernard Shaw’s masterpiece Pygmalion, Henry Higgins famously threatens to wring Eliza Doolittle’s neck. “Wring away!” she replies. “Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.” Until now, Shaw’s play about the flower girl who is transformed into a duchess by a.
Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw, Photo courtesy of Jay Tunney.
The unlikely friendship between prizefighter Gene Tunney and dramatist George Bernard Shaw is explored in a new book by the boxer’s son, Jay Tunney.
There are many books about famous literary friendships. John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley have more than a few dedicated to them, as do Edith Wharton and Henry James; Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. While these relationships are certainly interesting to dedicated readers and valuable for scholars, the bonds between writers and their non-writer friends can be even more compelling because of their unexpected nature and their basis in something outside of literary pursuits. For instance, T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx exchanged letters for years; Mark Twain was a close friend of the Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers. As the recently published The Prizefighter and the Playwright explores, such a friendship exis
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