Robert Shaw, actor, playwright, and novelist, felt that the literary establishment would never give him serious attention as a writer as long as he remained an actor. According to Shaw, the critics "still think actors are very effeminate and stupid.... On the other hand, I feel wounded that people who like me as an actor cannot get through my books. Acting releases the childlike side of me. The serious side goes into my books." While Shaw never achieved great acclaim as a man of letters, he has, contrary to his opinion of himself, been taken seriously as a writer. He won England's Hawthornden Prize in 1962 for his second novel, The Sun Doctor (1961), an award that put him in the company of Sean O'Casey, Robert Graves, and Evelyn Waugh. Critics have hailed him as a writer in the best tradition of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, a writer whose...