The cultural equivalent of Richard M. Nixon’s “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech was delivered by a disgruntled forty-one-year-old critic, failed novelist, and undistinguished playwright named George Bernard Shaw in 1898. In his final column as a critic in the then-towering Saturday Review, for which he toiled even as he struggled to get his own plays produced, Shaw lambasted the public for being unworthy of him. “Do I receive any spontaneous recognition for the prodigies of skill and industry I lavish on an unworthy institution and a stupid public?,” he wrote. “Not a bit of it: half my time is spent in telling people what a clever man I am. It’s no use merely doing clever things in England.” He complained, “It is humiliating, too, after making the most dazzling displays of professional ability, to have to tell people how capital it all is. Besides, they get so tired of it, that finally . . . they begin to detest it.”

Well, yes, when you have to notify the public that you’re clever, that does present a problem. Like Nixon, though, Shaw engineered one of history’s great reversals of fortune when, after a quarter of a century of Shaw strenuously seeking the title of genius, the world finally granted it. As late as 1902, the year he turned forty-six, his annual income was only £90—in the neighborhood of £10,000 today. We might not even know Shaw’s name today were it not for the efforts