Before he died, Shaw had been working on a new novel, The Ice Floe (a reference to the Inuit tradition of senicide, where people too old to be of use are set adrift on a floe). It was never published, but a few lines were included in an entertaining interview Shaw gave to People magazine in 1977. Here's that excerpt, and the following paragraph from Robin Leach's article:

 

 

"Mrs. Avery had propped a pillow under the head of her dying elderly friend and looked up through the barred windows of the old peoples' home psychopath ward...Dear God this home is filled with weeping old men and weeping old women...They are ignored, they are a burden to everyone...Couldn't even children love them? Are they just spectres to be shut up? Dear God, why is it that Jesus Christ did not sanctify old age by living till he was 90?"

 

 

 "These may be the best sentences I have ever written,"  says author Robert Shaw of this excerpt from his upcoming novel, The Ice Floe. He researched the book between movies and plays by inspecting the squalid conditions in old peoples' homes around New York City. "I want the truth out," he says. "If I never write anything else again, I've asked valid questions in a lovely prayer."