George Bernard
Shaw in Boston

By Irish America Staff
December / January 2005

An exhibit displaying special items in the George Bernard Shaw collection will open at the Bums Library, Boston College, on Thursday, November 18, 2004, and will run through April 2005.

The collection, acquired by the library in 2002, includes approximately 3,000 books and other printed items, such as many pamphlets written by Shaw, on all the controversial subjects of his day: education, war and peace, socialism, every aspect of economics, relations between England and Ireland, and the like.

Shaw, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, was a socialist, a pacifist, a vegetarian — and his views on these and other subjects are expressed at length in the collection. Hundreds of newspaper clippings reflect his views in letters to newspapers and his replies to other letters.

In addition to the printed materials there are portraits, photographs, playbills, programs, posters, letters and notes. Hundreds of playbills reveal the extensive and varied productions of Shaw’s major and minor plays.

The acquisition of this collection on Shaw is a significant addition to Boston College’s acclaimed Irish collections at Burns Library. Considered the most comprehensive repository of Irish research materials in the United States, the collection includes some of the world’s finest archives related to major Irish writers including Samuel Beckett, W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Frederick Green, Francis Stuart, Ethel Mannin, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Seamus Heaney.

The exhibit and collection are open to the public, and visitors are always welcome to the Burns Library of Boston College. ♦

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