George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist, born in Dublin on 26 July 1856 and dead on 2 November 1950. He wrote more than sixty plays, including Man and Superman, Pygmalion and Saint Joan, and was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. He moved to London in 1876, became a respected theatre and music critic by the mid-1880s, and joined the Fabian Society, of which he became the most prominent pamphleteer. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama and used his plays as vehicles to spread his political, social and religious ideas. His critical and popular successes of the early twentieth century included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.