George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant.
His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organised training. He moved to London as in 1876, where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic.
He began his literary career as a novelist and decided to write plays in order to illustrate
his criticism of the English stage.

Shaw's radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas. Shaw was a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights and an advocate of equality of income. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw accepted the honor but refused the money.

Plays by Shaw include Man and Superman (1903), Back to Methuselah (1921), Saint Joan (1923), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901), Androcles and the Lion (1912). In Major Barbara (1905), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Candida (1898), Pygmalion (1912).

It is a combination of the dramatic, the comic, and the social corrective that gives Shaw's comedies their special flavour.

Shaw's complete works appeared in thirty-six volumes between 1930 and 1950, the year
of his death.