George Bernard Shaw
1856–1950 10 entries
Biography
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist, one of the greatest dramatists in the English language. Born in Dublin in 1856, he left school at fifteen to work as a clerk, and in 1876 he moved to London, where he wrote five novels that found little success. He made his name as a witty and merciless critic of music and the theatre, joined the socialist Fabian Society and championed the plays of Henrik Ibsen. His own first plays, among them Mrs Warren’s Profession, which the censor banned, exposed the hypocrisy of Victorian society.
In comedies such as Arms and the Man, Major Barbara and Pygmalion he turned social questions into sparkling argument, and to Man and Superman he added the Maxims for Revolutionists, a small collection of his sharpest aphorisms. After his historical play Saint Joan he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1925, and the 1938 film of Pygmalion, the play that later became the musical My Fair Lady, won him an Academy Award for its screenplay. He wrote more than sixty plays and remained a vegetarian, a provocateur and a public figure to the end. He died in 1950, at the age of ninety-four, at his home in Ayot St Lawrence, after a fall in his garden.
- Aphorisms 10