In 1917, as the Great War reshapes civilization, Edwin Slosson turns his vigilant eye toward six figures he believes are the architects of modern thought. These are not saints or politicians but prophets in the older sense: voices crying out against convention, remakers of how we see ourselves and the world. Among them: the iconoclastic playwright George Bernard Shaw and the visionary author H.G. Wells. Slosson, himself a pioneering journalist and chemist, approaches these thinkers with the curiosity of a man meeting strangers who have nonetheless shaped his mind. The result is neither simple hagiography nor hostile criticism but something more interesting: a record of what it meant to be influential at the precise moment when influence was being redefined. Written during one of history's great ruptures, this book captures a transitional world still arguing about which ideas would survive the carnage. For readers who enjoy intellectual portraits, early modernist culture, or the peculiar pleasure of seeing which prophets from 1917 still speak to us a century later.
