George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist. Born in Dublin, he moved to London at twenty, failed as a novelist, made his name as a music and theater critic and a Fabian socialist speaker, and began writing plays in his late thirties. Over the next fifty years he produced more than sixty, among them Mrs Warren's Profession, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House and Saint Joan, each with a long preface arguing its case. He received the Nobel Prize in 1925 and an Academy Award for the film of Pygmalion in 1938, the only person to hold both.