George Bernard Shaw (July 26,1856 – November 2, 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, is an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist.

His influence on Western theater, culture and politics extends from the 1880s to his death and beyond.

He writes more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923).

With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw becomes the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Dublin, Shaw moves to London in 1876, where he struggles to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarks on a rigorous process of self-education.

By the mid-1880s he has become a respected theater and music critic.

Following a political awakening, he joins the gradualist Fabian Society and becomes 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 seeks 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 is secured with a series of critical and popular successes that include Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.

Shaw's expressed views are often contentious; he promotes eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposes vaccination and organized religion.

He courts unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigates British policy on Ireland in the postwar period.

These stances have no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years see a series of often ambitious plays, which achieve varying degrees of popular success.

In 1938 he provides the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he receives an Academy Award.

His appetite for politics and controversy remains undiminished; by the late 1920s he has largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often writes and speaks favorably of dictatorships of the right and left—he expresses admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin.

In the final decade of his life he makes fewer public statements, but continues to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honors, including the Order of Merit in 1946.

Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare; analysts recognize his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights.

The word Shavian has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.