George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and critic, best known for his comedic works of the stage that criticized societal norms and his adroit use of irony and allegory.

Shaw was born on the 26th of July, 1856 in Dublin, Ireland, the youngest child of three and the only boy. His father was an alcoholic and failed to earn a steady living, resulting in the family living in genteel poverty. As a youth, Shaw was primarily tutored by his uncle due to his dislike of formal schooling. His mother eventually left Ireland and her husband and moved to London with his two sisters. Shaw would follow in 1876, determined to be a writer.

While in London, Shaw attempted to broaden his intellectual horizons by attending lectures and frequently reading and writing in the British Museum. His early forays into writing were met with disdain by publishers, and he was unable to get any of his early novels or articles published. Shaw became interested in politics and joined the Fabian Society, a socialist society that promoted the complete transformation of British society through gradual political and economic change, rather than revolution. He produced several pamphlets and political essays for them and was heavily involved in their early undertakings.

Around the same time as his political awakening, Shaw began a career as a cultural critic, writing reviews and criticisms of plays, art installations, and most popularly, music. In 1895, Shaw began work as a theater critic for the Saturday Review. He often criticized the artificiality of Victorian plays and was a great admirer of the realist playwright Henrik Ibsen. Shaw began writing his own plays, and the first group of works were published as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant in 1898. In these works, Shaw explored moral failings and tragedy through the lense of irony and comedy, wanting his audience to “face unpleasant facts.”

Shaw’s work began to gain popularity in the first decade of the twentieth century. His first work to achieve widespread success was Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), an engrossing rendering of the Roman demagogue and enigmatic Egyptian queen. He followed up with Man and Superman (1903), the tale of a spiritually driven man combating the trappings of marriage. The play is particularly noted for its third act, “Don Jaun in Hell,” which is often performed separately for its hypnotic power. Prior to the onset of the first world war, Shaw produced his most famous work, Pygmalion (1913). It is Shaw at his best: a social commentary on the trappings of the English class system and a comedy on the didactics of speech. Pygmalion was an enormous success, and was later adapted into a film (1938) and the musical My Fair Lady (1956).

When World War I erupted across the continent, Shaw became a frequent and controversial opponent of the war. Joan of Arc was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1920, which inspired Shaw to write the play Saint Joan. It premiered on Broadway in 1923 to critical acclaim. A sweeping historical tale, Saint Joan was a commentary on the morality of those that persecuted Joan. Shaw would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 for his work on Saint Joan, an honor he would refuse to accept. In his later years, Shaw wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation of Pygmalion, for which he won an Academy Award in 1939. He continued to write and produced plays throughout the 1940s, and died at age 94 in 1950.

Shaw is frequently cited as the most important English language playwright since Shakespeare, though his legacy is not without controversy. He revived the comedy of manners and was famous for his comedic social critiques woven throughout his storytelling. Shaw’s works are frequently performed and adapted to this day. Shaw was also one of the three co-founders of the London School of Economics.