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Back to Methuselah

Downloads: Under 100
First published: 1921
Pages: 384

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Read by Thomas A. Copeland · 12 h 34 min · 19 parts

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Section 1
33:08
Section 2
32:25
Section 3
35:03
Section 4
30:46
Section 5
34:41
Section 6
31:06
Section 7
40:03
Section 8
36:39
Section 9
55:33
Section 10
56:34
Section 11
48:31
Section 12
48:00
Section 13
41:40
Section 14
39:14
Section 15
43:02
Section 16
19:04
Section 17
48:03
Section 18
41:29
Section 19
39:36

Back to Methuselah (1921) is a public domain work.

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About this book

Across five linked plays that reach from the Garden of Eden to the year 31,920, Shaw argues that humanity cannot govern its growing civilizations wisely within a lifespan of a few short decades. His remedy is creative evolution: people willing themselves to live for centuries, gaining the patience and foresight that ordinary politics lacks. The cycle opens with Adam and Eve grappling with the invention of death, moves through a satire of postwar British statesmen, then leaps into a strange, cerebral future. Long, ambitious, and openly philosophical, it is Shaw's fullest statement of his ideas about the Life Force. Written between 1918 and 1920 and published in 1921, it rewards a patient reader.

About the author

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, and socialist polemicist who became the leading English-language dramatist of his era. A co-founder of the Fabian Society, he used comedy to attack social hypocrisy and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.