George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw, who lived from July 26, 1856, to November 2, 1950, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre extended from the 1880s throughout his life and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923), combining contemporary satire with historical allegory, and in 1925 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, whose citation praised work marked by both idealism and humanity, though he rejected its monetary award. He became the first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award, receiving an Oscar for the screenplay of the 1938 film adaptation of Pygmalion, and scholars have since rated him among the greatest British dramatists, second only to Shakespeare; the term Shavian entered the language to describe his distinctive style and ideas.