Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright and critic, born in Dublin, who moved to London in 1876 and spent years writing unsuccessful novels before making his name as a music and theater critic and a Fabian socialist pamphleteer. From Widowers' Houses (1892) onward he wrote more than fifty plays, including Arms and the Man, Candida, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, each prefaced by an essay often longer than the play. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Academy Award in 1938 for the screenplay of Pygmalion. He died at ninety-four at Ayot St Lawrence.