Weintraub was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 17, 1929. He was the eldest child of Benjamin and Ray Segal Weintraub. He attended South Philadelphia High School, and then he attended West Chester State Teachers College (now West Chester University of Pennsylvania) where he received his B.S. in education in 1949. He continued his education at Temple University where he received his master's degree in English “in absentia,” as he was called to duty in the Korean War.

He received a commission as Army Second Lieutenant, and served with the Eighth Army in Korea receiving a Bronze Star.

After the War, he enrolled at Pennsylvania State University in September 1953; his doctoral dissertation “Bernard Shaw, Novelist” was accepted on May 6, 1956.

Except for visiting appointments, he remained at Penn State for all of his career, finally attaining the rank of Evan Pugh Professor of Arts and Humanities, with emeritus status on retirement in 2000. From 1970 to 1990 he was also Director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.

In 1922, it would have been hard to find two more celebrated men in England than George Bernard Shaw and - as he was then still known, thanks to a melodramatic travelogue by Lowell Thomas - “Lawrence of Arabia.” The first, of course, was the world’s most successful playwright, pamphleteer and self-publicist. The second had, overnight, become a national hero and already joined Rhodes, Wellington, and Clive of India in the mythology of the British Empire.

Shaw was 66, Lawrence was 34, and it was a fallow year for both. Having worn himself out on Back to Methuselah, Shaw felt he was finished as a playwright. Lawrence, after a stint in the Colonial office, had written Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and was about to change his name - first to Ross and then to Shaw - and try, unsuccessfully, to become an anonymous Royal Air Force private. Then one casual afternoon in March, they met; and for the next thirteen years, until Lawrence’s death in 1935, they maintained (with Mrs. Shaw as a third partner) one of the most unusual friendships in literary history.