George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw was the Irish playwright and critic who dominated British theatre for half a century and never stopped arguing. Born in Dublin in 1856, he moved to London at twenty and spent years writing unsuccessful novels before becoming the most feared dramatic critic in the city. His plays — Pygmalion, Man and Superman, Saint Joan, Heartbreak House — use wit as a delivery mechanism for serious ideas about class, gender, war, religion, and the limits of human rationality. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and the Academy Award in 1938 (for the Pygmalion screenplay), becoming the only person to win both. He lived to ninety-four, still writing, still provoking, still insisting that the reasonable man adapts to the world while the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.