George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950), known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture, and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s, he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man, in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social, and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century, his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, and Caesar and Cleopatra.