Vincent Sheean

VINCENT SHEEAN, who began his writing as a foreign correspondent and who scored his first international success with Personal History, was abashed — as any young writer would be — on his first meeting with George Bernard Shaw. But Shaw took a liking to him and to his wife, Diana Forbes-Robertson. He was invited again to the Victorian house on the edge of the little village of Ayot St. Lawrence, and as he came to know the great man and his charming wife Aunt Charlotte, his veneration for Shaw deepened and became articulate. These are the impressions of his last visit with George Bernard Shaw in the spring of 1949.

Shortly after leaving the University of Chicago. VINCENT SHEEAN set out on that long odyssey which he has described in his most popular book, Personal History. It was to lead him as a foreign correspondent to Europe and to Morocco as an observer of the Riffi; it was to show him the trouble brewing in Spain and in Munich which made him so certain that what we and the British were facing was Not Peace But a Sword, from 1942 to 1944, Mr. Sheean served with the Army Air Forces; at the war’s end he went for an extended visit to India. The Atlantic, which published several chapters of his Personal History, now welcomes his return.

"The system had been operating all around me from the day I came to college, and I had never seen it. I was a non-Jewish freshman pledged to a Jewish fraternity."