George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Recipient, The Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay (1938)
One of the crankiest characters of the 20th century, Shaw was spottily educated because he disliked being told what to do, much less thing. He became a vegetarian at 25; left a portion of his estate to develop a phonetic form of English; championed a positive form of eugenics in which people were encouraged to marry between races and classes; opposed vaccination, and considered modern medicine a quack’s paradise.
He was a committed socialist who flirted with totalitarianism in the 1930s; he was an easy mark for a charm offensive by Josef Stalin in 1931, and his fondness for Wagnerian opera left him with a soft spot for things Germanic. Having proclaimed marriage “a long, dull meal with dessert at the beginning,” he spent 56 years in an unconsummated one while pursuing lots and lots of dessert on the side for decades.
Shaw began as a critic, and such was the power of his writing that he almost single-handedly killed off the practice of English actor-managers of making all manner of eccentric cuts in Shakespeare’s plays. He wrote with insight and wit about music; the deeply conservative Elgar, a longtime friend, shared Shaw’s opposition to vivisection and, in Shaw’s estimation, wrote fine tunes to boot.
Shaw wrote 63 plays, covering his passion for social issues: marriage, women’s equality, religion, class and privilege, war, health care. His plays usually contained long, rather didactic prefaces (one 29 page script is preceded by a 67-page intro) explaining and enlarging his views. His wit is comparable to Wilde’s; he used it liberally to sweeten the often sharp moral point of his stage works.
Shaw’s 1905 play, Major Barbara, anticipates the World War I rise of immensely wealthy munitions manufacturers and their postwar efforts to legitimize their wealth; in the play, an idealistic Salvation Army officer is disillusioned by the organization's acceptance of arms and whiskey money. Though Shaw’s point was that tainted money can be spent for good ends as well as the most virtuous, nothing will cloud the brow of a Salvationist to this day like bringing up that title.
Pygmalion, which turned the Greek myth into a rather scathing commentary on British class stratification, is probably Shaw’s lasting monument; he became the only Nobelist to win an Oscar for the 1938 film; it was later turned into a musical and blockbuster Hollywood hit, My Fair Lady.
In between books, essays and plays, Shaw co founded The New Statesman magazine and the London School of Economics, and wrote over a quarter million letters. Disdaining a knighthood and the Order of Merit, he insisted only posterity’s judgment counted in appraising an artist’s work.
Shaw lived to be 94, dying from injuries suffered when he fell out of a tree he was pruning. 65 years after his death, George Bernard Shaw has a Facebook page with 175,678 followers.
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