George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright, critic, political thinker, and social reformer whose satirical and argumentative dramas transformed modern English-language theatre. Born in Dublin, Ireland, Shaw received an irregular formal education and moved to London in 1876, where he initially pursued journalism and an unsuccessful career as a novelist before becoming an influential music and theatre critic. He joined the Fabian Society, a British socialist organization advocating gradual social reform, and became an important public advocate of socialism, although some of his political positions were controversial and changed over time. Shaw turned increasingly to drama as a means of challenging prevailing theatrical conventions and social assumptions, producing works including Candida (1898), Man and Superman (1902), Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906), Pygmalion (1912), and Saint Joan (1923). His plays combined satire, intellectual debate, comedy, and social criticism, frequently addressing class, gender, religion, politics, economics, and morality. He wrote more than sixty plays and remained an influential public intellectual as well as dramatist. Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925, receiving the prize in 1926, for writing marked by idealism, humanity, stimulating satire, and poetic qualities; in 1939, he also received an Academy Award for the screenplay adaptation of Pygmalion.