George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin in 1856 into a family of Irelands well-established Protestant Ascendancy. His fathers alcoholism and business ineptitude caused the familys fortunes to decline, and Shaw left school at 15 to work as a clerk in a land agents office. In 1876, he moved to London, where he attended public lectures, joined political and cultural organizations, and, on most days, furthered his learning in the Reading Room of the British Museum. In 1884, he became a member of the newly founded Fabian Society, which was devoted to political reform along socialist principles, and remained one of their leading pamphleteers and campaigners for much of his life. Starting in the mid-1880s, Shaw worked variously as a book, music, art, and theatre reviewer, and this cultural criticism formed the basis of his important studies The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). He began playwrighting in earnest in the early 1890s, with Widowers Houses (1892), but his early plays were largely unperformed as they did not conform with the commercial theatres demands for musicals, farces, and melodramas. Shaw finally found success in New York in 1898 with The Devils Disciple (1897). With the windfall from the production, he retired from journalism and married Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend. In the new century, Shaw embarked on forging a theatre of the future, transforming the problem and discussion play into a theatre of ideas with Man and Superman (1903), John Bulls Other Island, and Major Barbara (1905). The popular writer of Fannys First Play (1911) and Pygmalion (1912) became a pariah following his condemnation of jingoistic patriotism at the outset of the First World War. His comeback was slow but he achieved worldwide acclaim as the writer of Saint Joan (1923) and was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write plays, including The Apple Cart (1928) and Geneva (1936), but his output dropped off significantly in the 1940s. Shaw died at his home in Ayot St Lawrence in 1950.

Brad Kent is Professor of British and Irish Literatures at Universit Laval in Quebec City, Canada. His publications include The Selected Essays of Sean OFaolain (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016) and George Bernard Shaw in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is general editor of the Oxford Worlds Classics series of Bernard Shaws writings.

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