Researching Charles Shaw

Shaw was born in South Melbourne, Victoria. During the Depression years he held a variety of jobs in the countryside and his interest in writing led him to work at a newspaper in Forbes, New South Wales. Shaw had several stories published by The Bulletin and eventually was employed by the magazine as a rural editor. He had two collections of Outback short stories Outback Occupations (1943) and A Sheaf of Shorts (1944) and one volume of verse The Warrumbungle Mare (1943) published as well as two detective stories The Green Token (1943) and Treasure of the Hills (1944).

Shaw decided after several rejections that no one outside Australia had an interest in stories about the Outback. He wrote a novel Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, published in 1952, about a U.S. Marine and a nun on a Japanese-held Pacific island. It was adapted for the screen as a 1957 film by John Huston and John Lee Mahin. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium in 1957.

Shaw wrote a series of four detective novels about Dennis Delaney under the nom de plume of "Bant Singer", named after his favourite car, a Singer Bantam. *You're Wrong, Delaney (1953)*Don't Slip, Delaney (1954)*Have Patience, Delaney (1954)*Your Move, Delaney (1956)

He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Sydney on 1 August 1955.

A significant figure in American abstract art, Shaw enjoyed a varied career as a writer and illustrator, poet, modernist painter, and collector. Born to a wealthy family and orphaned at a young age, Charles and his twin brother were raised by their uncle, Frank D. Shaw. At age nine, he was already an avid painter and had illustrated his first book, The Costumes of Nations. He also wrote and illustrated the children's book, It Looked Like Spilt Milk, published in 1947. Shaw graduated from Yale in 1914, where he contributed artwork to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. At Yale, he was also a member of the St. Anthony Hall aka Delta Psi fraternity, and completed a year of architectural studies at Columbia University. He worked as a freelance writer for The New Yorker, The Smart Set, and Vanity Fair, where his focus was the 1920s theater and café society. In 1927, Shaw enrolled in Thomas Hart Benton's class at the Art Students League of New York. He also studied privately with George Luks. Shaw’s work is part of most major collections of American Art, including the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, the Smithsonian Institution, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Corcoran Gallery.

As a founding member of the American Abstract Artists Shaw participated in the first annual exhibition. His article, A Word to the Objector, was included in the group's first publication.

Shaw was born in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh.

While at WCAU in the early 1950s, he was one of the first broadcast journalists to speak out against Senator Joseph McCarthy, even before Murrow did so.

In the late 1950s, Shaw was drawn to the story of the burgeoning Cuban revolution, and he travelled to Cuba to secretly meet with Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl Castro in the mountains of southern Cuba. When Castro came to power, Shaw was invited to Cuba by the new government, and he was also given a commendation by Castro when the new Cuban leader visited Washington in the early 1960s, before relations between the two governments turned sour.

After leaving CBS in the early 1960s, Shaw became editor of the Bucks County Gazette, in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

He is notable for his autobiography (When I was a Child), published by Methuen in March 1903 under the name "An Old Potter". Shaw was a staunch Liberal and believer in free trade, who intended to warn of the dangers of protectionism. Fellow Liberal Robert Spence Watson wrote the book's introduction, calling it a reminder of the condition of child labour in the 1840s and as an inspiration to improve children's conditions. However, despite Watson financing 1500 copies, Shaw's autobiography did not sell well. The novelist Arnold Bennett used the book as a source for Clayhanger (1910) and it was republished in 1969, since when it has received more attention and is

...now valued both as a moving firsthand account of child labour in the pottery industry, and as a narrative of his ‘pursuit of knowledge under difficulties’, inspired by the values of self-help and his religious faith, which enabled him to escape from a life of manual labour. The book vividly illuminates many aspects of Potteries social history, such as popular recreations, life in the workhouse, and the riots of 1842, in a way unequalled by any other source. The popularity of ‘history from below’, and academic interest in working-class autobiographies, have established When I was a Child as not only an essential source for Potteries history, but also a classic of its kind and a memorial to its otherwise obscure author.

Shaw's excavations at Igbo-Ukwu, Nigeria revealed a 9th-century indigenous culture that created sophisticated work in bronze metalworking, independent of any Arab or European influence and centuries before other sites that were better known at the time of discovery. He was awarded the C.B.E. in 1972 for his contributions. In 1989, he was made a tribal chief in Nigeria.

In addition, Shaw worked on expanding communications about African archaeology; in 1964, he founded the West African Archaeological Newsletter, which he edited until 1970; from 1971 to 1975, he edited the West African Journal of Archaeology.