Bernard Shaw was born George Bernard Shaw on July 26, 1856, at number 3 Upper Synge Street (now 33 Synge Street), Dublin. He was the third and last child of George Carr Shaw, a grain merchant, and Elizabeth (Gurly) Shaw, a singer who instilled an appreciation for music in her young son. Shaw disliked the name George and never used it, although he signed his initials "G.B.S." He attended school until the age of 15, when he left to become an office clerk. He left Dublin for London in 1876 and did not return for 30 years. He began his writing career in the late 1870s with the publication of several articles in journals and political newspapers, along with a series of novels published in socialist periodicals. Most of this early fiction was not well received, and Shaw's primary reputation was as a journalist, critic, and political ideologue, especially after he joined the Fabian Society in 1884, of which he became a prominent member. He moved into playwriting in 1892 when his first play, Widowers' Houses, was performed by J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre. This ran for only one performance, and his next two plays, Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893) and The Philanderer (1893), were not performed for many years. He achieved success, however, with the plays Arms and the Man (1894) and Candida (1897), which were well-received in both London and New York.

In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend, a wealthy Irish heiress and fellow Fabian, and their marriage lasted until her death in 1943. Shaw wrote prolifically around the turn of the century, producing some of his best known plays during this time, including The Devil's Disciple (1897), Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), You Never Can Tell (1899), and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1899). During this period he also wrote John Bull's Other Island (1904), which was performed for King Edward VII in 1905, Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906). In 1913 he wrote Pygmalion, which was produced first in Vienna, then in London in 1914, and later adapted into the musical My Fair Lady in 1956.

Shaw's dramatic production slowed during the First World War as theatre costs increased and Shaw's pacifist stance grew highly unpopular. He reemerged after the war to write three of his great plays: Heartbreak House (1920), Saint Joan (1923), and The Apple Cart (1929). Saint Joan helped him win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, and for the rest of his life he was awarded many honors and titles, few of which he accepted. As he grew older he began to spend more time at his cottage at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, which he purchased in 1906 and would later become known as "Shaw's Corner." When he died on November 2, 1950, at the age of 94, he left behind a prolific bibliography that included more than fifty plays. According to his instructions he was cremated and his ashes were mingled with his wife's and spread in the garden at Shaw's Corner.

Sources:

Hogan, Robert, ed. Dictionary of Irish Literature, 2 vols. Westport: Greenwood P, 1996.

Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw, 4 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, 1988-1992.

Laurence, Dan. Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.

Wearing, J.P., Elsie Adams, and Donald Haberman, eds. G.B. Shaw: an annotated bibliography of writings about him. 3 vols. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1986- 1987.