George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 and spent his life making England uncomfortable with the precision of his observations about itself. He was the most successful playwright in the English language for more than four decades. He was also — a thing that his biographers note with some frequency — constitutionally incapable of agreeing with anyone about anything.
He was the son of a failed businessman and a mother who left the family home to pursue a career as a music teacher in London when Shaw was a boy, taking his sisters with her and leaving him with his father. He moved to London himself at twenty, where he lived in near-poverty for nine years while writing five novels that nobody published and attending every public meeting, lecture, and debate he could find. He educated himself through argument and observation. He did not go to university. He did not need to.
The plays came later and they were perfect in a way that irritated people who found his ideas too socialist, too irreligious, too Irish. Mrs Warren’s Profession was banned. The Doctor’s Dilemma offended the medical establishment. Major Barbara offended the armaments industry, which was not used to being offended from the stage. Saint Joan, which he wrote at sixty-seven, is still performed everywhere in the world.
He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and used the acceptance speech to express his reservations about the Nobel Prize.
He died in 1950 at ninety-four, having broken his leg the previous summer by falling out of a tree he had been climbing in his garden. He was, to the end, impossible to contain.
