Irish author, critic and dramatist, St. John Greer Ervine (1883 - 1971), believed that some of the dramatic characters populating the plays of George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950) were reoccurring characters who could be counted upon to appear again and again. He had a fine time illustrating this point and thinks nothing of stooping to compare Shaw with Shakespeare: "Shakespeare primarily was interested in people. Mr. Shaw primarily is interested in doctrine..." Thirty-five years later St. John Ervine would be awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of George Bernard Shaw.
Click here to read various witty remarks by George Bernard Shaw. In this article, P.G. Wodehouse (1904 - 1975) sounded-off on a new type of novelist that had surfaced in 1919 - and has yet to decamp. He breaks the novelizing classes into two groups:
"...the ordinary novelist, the straightforward, horny-handed dealer in narrative, who is perfectly contented to turn out two books a year, on the understanding - a gentleman's agreement between himself and his public - that he reserves movie rights and is allowed an occasional photograph in the papers.."
One of the first reviews of F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned
(1922). The reviewer was impressed:
"The Beautiful and the Damned is a real story, but a story greatly damaged by wit."
A review of T.S. Eliot's (1888 – 1965) second collection, Poems (1919), as reviewed by E.E. Cummings (1894 – 1962) in the well respected magazine of the arts, THE DIAL. It was in this volume that Eliot's well remembered series of quatrains first appeared: "Sweeney Among the Nightingales", "Sweeney Erect" "The Hippopotamus" and "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service". Cummings at that time was living in Paris and writing his first book, The Enormous Room , which would be published in 1922. The review of that work can be read here. In 1944, Karl Jay Shapiro (1913 – 2000) was pulling in the big-bucks as a U.S. Army Private stationed in New Guinea, but unlike most of the khaki-clad Joes in at least a ten mile radius, Shapiro had two volumes of poetry under his belt (Person Place and Thing and "Place of Love") in addition to the memory of having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In this short interview, he explains what a poet's concerns should be and offers some fine tips for younger poets to bare in mind. A year latter, while he was still in uniform, Shapiro would be awarded the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for poetry With the publishing of the first part of his autobiography, "Reveries Over Childhood and Youth", W.B. Yeats (1865 - 1939) got some attention in the American press. Here is a small notice from an American society magazine which praises his ability as an artist to influence other writers, such as George Bernard Shaw, John M. Synge, George Moore and Dr. Douglas Hyde. | 
