Shaw won the Nobel Prize, then an Oscar for Pygmalion
George Bernard Shaw (1856 to 1950) wrote more than sixty plays, won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature and, in 1938, an Academy Award for the screenplay of Pygmalion. Critics still often rank him second only to Shakespeare among British dramatists, while his politics made him endlessly controversial.
His birthplace was a house on Upper Synge Street in Dublin's lower-middle-class Portobello district, and he was the last of three children, the sole boy, born to Bessie Gurly and her husband George Carr Shaw. The family were English-descended members of the Protestant Ascendancy, but the father was an ineffectual drinker, pensioned off from a civil service sinecure and then an irregular corn merchant. Biographer Michael Holroyd suggests Bessie married to escape a domineering great-aunt, and if George hoped for her money he was disappointed. She came to despise him, and their son later summed up the household as shabby-genteel poverty.
Shaw left for London in 1876, failed to make his name as a novelist and educated himself relentlessly. By the mid-1880s he was a respected critic of music and theatre. A political awakening led him into the Fabian Society, which favoured gradual reform, and he became its best-known pamphleteer. Inspired by Ibsen, he wanted English drama to be realistic and to carry ideas about politics, society and religion. His first public success, Arms and the Man, came in 1894, and Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra cemented his standing. Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan followed across the next two decades.
His opinions were often provocative. He championed eugenics and a reformed alphabet, and campaigned against both vaccination and organised faith. He blamed both sides equally for the First World War and attacked British policy in Ireland, though he was no republican. By the late 1920s he had abandoned Fabian gradualism and spoke warmly of dictators on the right and left, admiring both Mussolini and Stalin. None of this dented his output, and the inter-war years brought ambitious plays with mixed popular success.
He kept writing almost until he died at 94, having turned down every state honour, including the Order of Merit in 1946. The adjective Shavian now names both his ideas and his distinctive way of expressing them, and generations of English-language playwrights show his influence.
Source: George Bernard Shaw
