George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, and political activist. He is known primarily for his comedies, which simultaneously examined high intellectual and moral issues. He was born in 1856 in Dublin and grew up in a musical atmosphere—his mother was a talented mezzo-soprano and would host gatherings of other musicians, including her teacher George John Lee, a well-known figure on Dublin’s music scene. Following a lackluster experience in school, Shaw found work as a junior clerk at a land agents’ firm in Dublin 1871, where he worked for several years. Lee moved to Dublin in 1873, and Shaw’s mother and two sisters followed shortly thereafter, ostensibly for financial reasons, leaving Shaw to live with his father. Shaw moved to London following his sister’s death from tuberculosis in 1876. Around this time, he began attending meetings with the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and reading the works of Karl Marx. Shaw joined the Fabian Society, a socialist organization, in 1884 and published the grouop’s manifesto the following year. He would go on to write and edit several essays for the society. Some of Shaw’s political views are often characterized as controversial or contradictory—though he condemned anti-Semitism, for instance, he was not overtly critical of Hitler’s rise to power. Shaw’s writing career picked up in the 1880s with the publication of two novels and his takeover as art critic of The World, a weekly paper. He served as theatre critic for The Saturday Review in the 1890s. Shaw’s first commercial success as a playwright was the satirical comedy Arms and the Man (1894), though it was panned by critics. His career as a playwright took off around the turn of the century with Caesar and Cleopatra, which premiered in 1899; and with Major Barbara and Man and Superman, both of which premiered in 1905. His most successful play, Pygmalion, premiered in Vienna in 1913. Shaw continued to write into his 90s and remained in the public eye, though he moved from London to Ayot St. Lawrence, a country village in the south of England, following the death of his wife Charlotte in 1943. He died there in 1950, at the age of 94.