Never quite respectable, Harris had been tolerated – even courted – as an amiable vulgarian when he was a rising star. However, his booming voice and four-letter language, his inability to look like anything other than an Albanian highwayman even when dressed in tails, his gluttonous gormandising and insatiable womanising, quickly made him a pariah in Edwardian circles as his career began to slip and he began to snatch at shady quick-money opportunities. While Harris’s career was hitting bottom, and doing it often, Shaw’s reputation as playwright and publicist was growing. However strained Shaw’s loyalties to his former editor became, they persisted, and both the strains and loyalties emerge in a generation of their correspondence. Through these pages emerge the literary and political life of Edwardian and Georgian England, and wartime America, via Shaw’s wit and ebullience and Harris’s pomposity and paranoia. And in the relationship of the correspondents in these 121 letters shows a drama of two personalities whom Harris saw as having shared a heyday before one fell upon bad luck. To Harris it was a melodrama, to Shaw a tragicomedy.