George Bernard Shaw

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), Irish dramatist, critic, and political propagandist whose witty plays contained serious philosophical and social ideas. Born in Dublin, he moved to London (after 1876), where he became a music and theater critic and a leader of the Fabian Society. He began writing his brilliantly witty, ironical, and polemical comedies in the 1890s. Success came with such plays as Major Barbara (1905), Caesar and Cleopatra (1906; written 1899), Androcles and the Lion (1912), and Pygmalion (1913; adapted as the musical My Fair Lady, 1956). He lost popularity for his opposition to World War I, but regained it with Back to Methuselah (1921). Saint Joan (1921), his greatest success, was followed by the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature.