George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin on July 26, 1856. He was the youngest of three children, and the only son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw. Shaw was educated at Protestant and Catholic day schools and was tutored by a clerical uncle. Before he was sixteen years of age, Shaw’s formal education ended and he was working in the office of Uniacke Townshend, a land agent. Shaw continued to educate himself by reading the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and others. Shaw was also well-educated in music during his youth.Shaw moved to London in 1876 at the age of twenty.

The following years were a struggle Shaw. He had little money and several failures. In his early twenties, he ghost-wrote musical criticism for George John Vandeleur Lee. From 1879 to 1880, he worked at the Edison Telephone Company of London. During these years, he wrote novels such as Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882) and An Unsocial Socialist (1883), his final novel. His fiction was a failure, but that was not the end of Shaw’s literary career.

In 1882, he became a socialist after hearing a lecture by Henry George. By 1884, Shaw was involved with the Fabian Society, a small socialist group, and edited Fabian Essays in Socialism in 1889. Shaw also became a vegetarian, a great orator, and a polemicist. In 1885, after assisting William Archer with some art criticism, Archer recommended him to Edmund Yates, editor of the World. Shaw was hired as the art critic, also writing book reviews and music columns. He wrote music reviews for the Star under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto. From 1890 to 1894, he was the music critic for the World. He also spent time as a vestryman and borough councilor of St. Pancras Parish in London from 1887 to 1903.

Shaw changed jobs again in 1895 when he was recruited as a theatre critic by Frank Harris, editor of the Saturday Review. Shaw held this job for three years, during which time he asserted that the theatre needed to be reformed. His ideas were controversial, especially since he was known to criticize Shakespeare and praise Ibsen.

Although he was considered quite successful, Shaw’s real turning point did not come until 1898 when he published his first seven plays in a two-volume set entitled Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant. It included such early plays as Mrs. Warren’s Profession and The Philanderer. Shaw got married that year, at age forty-two, to Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress who was also a member of the Fabian Society. Shaw had a few extra-marital affairs, only one of which jeopardized his marriage, his affair with Mrs. Stella Patrick Campbell.

After his wedding, Shaw continued to write plays, as well as prose such as The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898, and Common Sense About the War in 1914. He remained politically active and involved in theatre production. In 1925, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

When Mrs. Shaw died in 1943, Shaw left his apartment in London and went to live permanently in his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence, a village in Hertfordshire. By this time, Shaw was greatly respected in Europe and America, both as the great G.B.S. persona, and as a playwright. On 26 July 1950, Shaw’s ninety-fourth birthday, the Shaw Society of America was founded. Four months later, on 2 November, Shaw died in his home at Ayot St. Lawrence.