Back to Methuselah is his world classic. As the original text of the five plays and the preface has also been revised, the present volume is of outstanding interest to all readers of Bernard Shaw, whether they applaud him as a lastingly influential thinker, as the foremost prose playwright in English, as a stylist in the tradition of Bunyan and Defoe and Swift, or berate him as a political gadfly - whose sting has lost none of its potency since, as a young man of twenty, he left Ireland for England as long ago as 1876.