Today's History... (2nd November)

George Bernard Shaw - a brief overview :

G.B.SHAW - Renowned Playwright

✒️He was born in Dublin, Ireland on 26th July, 1856. While so, He left is schooling at very young age of 14 to work in a land agent’s office. In 1876, he quit the job and moved to London, where his mother, a music teacher, had settled. He worked various jobs while trying to write plays. He began publishing book reviews and art and music criticism in 1885. Meanwhile, he became a committed reformer and an active force in the newly established Fabian Society, a group of middle-class socialists. His first play, Widowers’ House, was produced in 1892.

• Vegetarianism and the luxuriant beard were among the things with which Shaw became associated by the general public. He was also a teetotaller and non-smoker, and was known for his habitual costume of unfashionable woollen clothes, made for him by Jaeger.

• He became the theater critic for the Saturday Review in 1895, and his reviews over the next several years helped shape the development of drama. In 1898, he published Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, which contained Arms and the Man,The Man of Destiny, and other dramas. In 1904, Man and Superman was produced.

• He supported socialism and decried the abuses of capitalism, the degradation of women, and the ill effects of poverty, violence, and war. His writing was filled with humor, wit and sparkle, as well as reformist messages. His play Pygmalion, produced in 1912, later became the hit musical and movie My Fair Lady.

• When on 1925, He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and used the substantial prize money to start an Anglo-Swedish literary society. He lived simply, abstained from alcohol, caffeine, and meat, declined most honors and awards, and continued writing into his 90s. He produced more than 40 plays before his death in 1950.

• His letters, edited by Dan H. Laurence, were published between 1965 and 1988. Shaw once estimated his letters would occupy twenty volumes; Laurence commented that, unedited, they would fill many more. Shaw wrote more than a quarter of a million letters, of which about ten per cent have survived; 2,653 letters are printed in Laurence's four volumes. Among Shaw's many regular correspondents were his childhood friend Edward McNulty; his theatrical colleagues (and amitiés amoureuses) Mrs Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry; writers including Lord Alfred Douglas, H. G. Wells and G. K. Chesterton; the boxer Gene Tunney; the nun Laurentia McLachlan; and the art expert Sydney Cockerell. In 2007 a 316-page volume consisting entirely of Shaw's letters to The Times was published.

• His diaries for 1885–1897, edited by Weintraub, were published in two volumes, with a total of 1,241 pages, in 1986. Reviewing them, the Shaw scholar Fred Crawford wrote: "Although the primary interest for Shavians is the material that supplements what we already know about Shaw's life and work, the diaries are also valuable as a historical and sociological document of English life at the end of the Victorian age." After 1897, pressure of other writing led Shaw to give up keeping a diary. 

• George Bernard Shaw died on 2nd November 1950.

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