Bernard Shaw, George - Life

George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856 in Dublin. When he was 20 he moved to London. He tried to write novels but they were rejected by publishers.
In 1884 he joined Fabian Society, a group of political intellettuals who aimed to transform English society.

He worked as a music and theatre critic for the Saturday Review and began to write plays.
His first plays were published in 2 collections: Plays Unpleasant and Plays Pleasent. As his career progressed, his works became increasingly discussion forums. He advocated equality of income, anti-colonial movements, women's suffrage and the abolition of private property.
He was influenced by the German philosopher, Nietzsche, from whom he derived his theory of individual life force. He was also influenced by his study of the plays of the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen.
In his lecture The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw explained how Ibsen intended his plays to be a vehicle for Ideas and introduced real debates and discussion.
One of his works, Pygmalion, has proved to be his most popular work. Pygmalion became a film in 1938, a broadway musical in 1956 under the name of My Fair Lady and then a musical in 1964.

Shaw wrote over 60 plays in his life. He died at the age of 94 in 1950.
He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

Plays Pleasent and unpleasent

Shaw called his first plays "unpleasant" since they were about social questions like poverty, inequalities of the English class system, prostituition and sex. The Plays Pleasant were a counterbalance helping Shaw to find audiences that the "unpleasant" plays had offended.