George Bernard Shaw at Whitehall Court. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, "John Bull's Other Island", a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might
Padraic Colum the rest of their lives. In America, Colum took up children's writing and published a number of collections of stories for children, beginning with "The King of Ireland's Son" (1916). This book came about when Colum started translating an Irish folk tale from Gaelic because he did not want to forget the language. After it was published in the New York Tribune, Hungarian Illustrator Willy Pogany suggested the possibility of a book collaboration, so Colum wove the folktale into a long, epic story. Three of his books for children were awarded retrospective citations for the Newbery Honor. A contract for