Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw, Photo courtesy of Jay Tunney. The unlikely friendship between prizefighter Gene Tunney and dramatist George Bernard Shaw is explored in a new book by the boxer’s son, Jay Tunney. There are many books about famous literary friendships. John Keats, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley have more than a few dedicated to them, as do Edith Wharton and Henry James; Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. While these relationships are certainly interesting to dedicated readers and valuable for scholars, the bonds between writers and their non-writer friends can be even more compelling because of their unexpected nature and their basis in something outside of literary pursuits. For instance, T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx exchanged letters for years; Mark Twain was a close friend of the Standard Oil magnate Henry Huttleston Rogers. As the recently published The Prizefighter and the Playwright explores, such a friendship existed between the great Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw and Gene Tunney, the two-time World Heavyweight Champion.