'When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.'

A highly opinionated man who lived to the age of 94, George Bernard Shaw left an enormous body of written work -plays, prefaces, novels, music and drama criticism, essays, tracts and letters. An early exponent of what were then regarded as the equally eccentric fads of spelling reform and vegetarianism, he was also an important member of the Fabian Society and a proponent of socialism. He is still the only person ever to have won both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize - the Oscar was for the film script of the 1937? Pygmalion.

Short Biography

'Fortunately I have a heart of stone, else my relations would have broken it long ago.'

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856. His early family life was not very happy: his father was an unsuccessful businessman and his mother apparently more interested in her music lessons than in her son. Her music teacher George Vandeleur Lee shared their house for some years, and Mrs Shaw left her husband to follow Lee when he went to London in 1872. George was unhappy at school, and instead of going to Trinity College like hs contemporary Oscar Wilde (link) he left school to take an office job at the age of fifteen. In 1876 he followed his mother and sisters to London, and returned to Ireland only on short visits.

In London, he worked for a few more years as a clerk, but began to educate himself, studying a wide range of subjects in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In the 1880s, he began to make a living as a journalist and critic. In 1898 he married the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Their marriage appears to have been mostly celibate, but they lived happily together. In 1906 they settled in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence, where they lived together until Charlotte's death in ??1943. Shaw' himself died at Ayot St. Lawrence in 1950.

Early Works

Novels

Music Criticism

'Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.'

The English Theatre

Plays and Prefaces

Shaw wrote over 50 plays, which belonged to the mainstream of European theatre rather than the more local Irish school developed in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin under the guidance of WB Yeats. His plays were written to work out the expression of ideas rather than the development of character, and he often commented and expanded on these ideas in the long prefaces which were published with the plays.
Many of the works are dramatized essays on the subject of individual responsibility or freedom of spirit against the conformist demands of society. Shaw wrote over 50 plays, and he continued to write them even in his 90s.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924.

Politics

'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

His childhood in Dublin left Shaw with a passionate hatred of poverty and its effects. In 1884, he was a founding member of the Fabian society, and he became a practiced public speaker on behalf of the society.

Shaw became quite unpopular in Britain when he took a stand against participation in the First World War, but regained his place in public opinion after the war
"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul."

The Wit and Raconteur

'I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation. '

The Grand Old Man

His Legacy

The Final Controversy - Shaw's Will

Some Interesting Works

• The Perfect Wagnerite
  
  Music criticism treating Wagner's Ring cycle from a socialist point of view.
• Pygmalion
  
  The musical 'My Fair Lady' was based on this play.
• Saint Joan (1923)
• Man and Superman (1903)??
• The Doctor's Dilemma
• Major Barbara
• Arms and the Man
• the Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism