Born in Dublin of middle-class but impoverished stock, Shaw was forced to leave school at 15 to take a job as a clerk. His father became an alcoholic and in 1872 his mother left home, going to London with her 2 daughters. Shaw followed them there in 1876.In London, Shaw regularly went to the British Museum in order to educate himself, a fact which may partly account for the originality and independence of his thinking. In the mid-1880s, he began to be active in the Socialist movement, becoming a noted orator and an influential member of the recently-founded Fabian Society, an influential group of middle-class socialists who sought to transform society by non-revolutionary means. In 1889, he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in Socialism. He also became famous for his music, drama and art criticism.
Shaw was quick to see the importance of Henrik Ibsen, the pioneering Norwegian dramatist who used the theatre to expose social isues. Ibsen's influence is apparent in Shaw's first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), which attacked slum landlordism in London. His second, Mrs Warren's Profession (1894), tackled organised prostitution and was banned as obscene. Other plays followed, all of which displayed the characteristic 'Shavian' mix of witty irony and moral seriousness.
Shaw's comic touch is seen at its best in Pygmalion (1913), which was adapted as the musical comedy and film My Fair Lady. But the play also addresses important issues of class, social power and even sexual politics in the relationship between the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle and her teacher, the middle class Professor Henry Higgins.
Shaw's productivity dried up temporarily during World War I, which he saw as a crude struggle between greedy imperial powers. In Heartbreak House (1920), he condemned the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation. Back to Methuselah (1921) was more optimistic, setting out Shaw's theory of creative evolution in a sequence of parable plays. In 1923, Shaw produced what many regard as his masterpiece, Saint Joan, for which he received the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. Witty yet deeply moving, the play depicts Joan of Arc as a mystic visionary and also as a plain-speaking peasant girl.
Throughout his long career, Shaw always used his plays as a vehicle for his ideas. He was adept at blurring the distinctions between high drama and comedy to show simultaneously the absurdity and the seriousness of life. 'Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh,' he wrote in The Doctor's Dilemma (1906).
Although his later work is not considered to be of the same standard, Shaw continued to write into his 90s and was always in the public eye. All his plays were accompanied by extended prefaces which persuasively and influentially set out the ideas contained in the plays. His letters are considered to be among the best in the English language.
