George Bernard Shaw
Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist (1856–1950)
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George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist who lived from 1856 to 1950 and became one of the most influential literary figures of his era. He matters because his witty, thought-provoking plays and sharp social commentary shaped modern drama and helped establish the role of theater as a vehicle for challenging conventional ideas.
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George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings deal sternly with prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy to make their stark themes more palatable. <a href="https://www.las
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George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876; he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, and Caesar and Cleopatra.
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1856 births1950 deaths19th-century British dramatists and playwrights19th-century Irish dramatists and playwrights19th-century Irish male writers20th-century British dramatists and playwrights20th-century British male writers20th-century British screenwriters20th-century Irish dramatists and playwrightsAccidental deaths from falls in the United KingdomAccidental deaths in England