(July 26, 1856 November 2nd, 1950)

George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26 1856 in Dublin Ireland the son of a civil servant. Although he was best known for drama, he was also proficient in the areas of journalism, music and literary criticism. He began his literary career as a novelist. Shaws works concerned themselves mostly with prevailing social problems, specifically with what he saw as the exploitation of the working middle class. Shaw attended various schools throughout his youth but always harboured an animosity towards schools and teachers. He is quoted as saying that Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents.

In his personal life, Shaw was an avid Socialist and a member of the Fabian society. In 1898 he married fellow Fabian member and Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townsend. He was the first person to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature as well as an Oscar (for his work on Pygmalion, which was an adaptation of his play of the same name). He wrote 60 plays, most of which deal with social themes such as marriage, religion, class government and health care. Two of his greatest influences were Henrik Ibsen and Henry Fielding. Ibsens plays and Fieldings expulsion from playwriting inspired him to write his own plays on the social injustices of the world around him, including the late nineteenth century censorship of plays, continued from Prime Minister Walpoles rein in the mid 1740s. The Lord Chamberlains Examiner of Plays especially irked him:A gentleman who robs, insults, and suppresses me as irresistibly as if he were the Tsar of Russia and I the meanest of his subjects But I must submit [my play] in order to obtain from him an insolent and insufferable document, which I cannot read without boiling of the blood, certifying that in his opinion his opinion! my play does not in its general tendency contain anything immoral or otherwise improper for the stage, and that the Lord Chamberlain therefore allows its performance (confound his impudence!). (Mainly xv)

George Bernard Shaw died at the age of 94 due to injuries incurred from falling while pruning a tree.

Listen to an Interview with George Bernard Shaw from 1937.

If you would like to know what Shaw thought about something, the NYTimes has an archive of Shaw: his quotes, his opinions, pictures, etc.

To see a selection of Shaws Essays courtesy of Brown University, click HERE.

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Mallory Slade, Karen Bilotti

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