George Bernard Shaw

Irish dramatist, critic and social reformer, Shaw's public image was his own created caricature. He was uniquely honored by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for Pygmalion. His writing reveals his fear of intimacy, prudishness, shyness and idealism. Political and economic socialism, a new religion of creative evolution, vegetarianism and spelling reform were several of his causes. His plays and essays, never written for sheer entertainment's sake, were the vehicles for his theories.