SHAW has never gone to America and never will go
now. Why should he? Half of America has come to
him and the rest supports him. He has managed to abuse
the whole of it quite as well as any other English author,
without going to the trouble of accepting its hospitality
or fattening at its expense on a lecture tour.

He knows all the frailties of America and its strong
points too. This is not surprising, for he is more Ameri-
can than anything else in his point of view. Americans
think you can achieve anything by publicity, and Shaw
has pretty well proved their case. He, Aimee MacPherson
and Herbert Hoover could form the Trinity of the new
world very nicely.

He has kept up a newspaper knowledge of contempo-
rary America, but his literary interest died out with Mark
Twain and Henry James. Before that he knew a bit of
Poe, Whitman, Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne and
Cooper, but of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale,
James Branch Cabell, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore
Dreiser and such writers he hasn't the remotest idea.
O. Henry he knows; Mencken, O'Neill, Upton Sinclair,
too, and a bit of Sinclair Lewis.

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