Born in Totnes, Devon, Alexander Mordaunt Shairp lived the quiet life of a dedicated schoolmaster. Educated at Saint Paul's School and Lincoln College, Oxford, he served as extension lecturer in modern literature at Oxford and London universities. His major academic position was assistant master at University College School in London, where, through writing and directing the school plays, he put into practice his belief that the developing youth gains self-assurance through acting before an audience. Focusing on the formative years of adolescence and young adulthood, Shairp became a dramatist of psychoneurosis, popularizing for audiences of the 1920s and 1930s the theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis concerning the effects of the psychic traumas of childhood. His best-known work, The Green Bay Tree (1933), chronicles the disintegration of a young man deprived of a traditional upbringing.

A "reluctant celebrity" due to the controversy The Green Bay Tree evoked in...