Stanley Weintraub has, in nearly forty books written and edited over three decades, become one of America's foremost biographers and literary historians. An indefatigable scholar and expositor of George Bernard Shaw, he has edited Shaw's fiction, plays, letters, diaries, and other prose. He has rescued the forgotten (Reginald Turner), elucidated the self-obscuring (T. E. Lawrence), investigated the aesthetic (Aubrey Beardsley and James Abbott McNeill Whistler), and opened visions of Queen Victoria that Lytton Strachey and others had sought to obscure. He has also developed and practiced the art of collective biography in such works as The Last Great Cause (1968), Four Rossettis (1977), The London Yankees (1979), A Stillness Heard Round the World (1985), and Long Day's Journey into War (1991), the last two detailing worldwide personal responses to historical events, illustrating Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum that all history is biography.

Born in Philadelphia on 17 April 1929 to Benjamin Weintraub, an insurance agent, and...