Shaw Dies at 94: Theater's Sharpest Wit Falls Silent

George Bernard Shaw left behind more than sixty plays that used razor-sharp wit to demolish class hypocrisy and social convention. Born in Dublin in 1856 to an alcoholic father and a musically ambitious mother who eventually left the family to follow her voice teacher to London, Shaw grew up in genteel poverty and educated himself through relentless reading at the British Museum after moving to London at twenty. He spent nearly a decade writing novels that no publisher wanted before discovering that the theater was the form that suited his voice: polemical, funny, and incapable of leaving any audience comfortable with its assumptions. His plays tackled prostitution in Mrs Warren's Profession, arms dealing in Major Barbara, the phonetics of class in Pygmalion, and the nature of religious faith in Saint Joan. Pygmalion became one of the most adapted works in theatrical history, forming the basis for My Fair Lady. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925, initially refusing it before accepting on the condition that the prize money be used to fund Swedish-to-English literary translation. He won the Academy Award in 1938 for the screenplay adaptation of Pygmalion, making him the only person in history to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. He was a committed socialist, a Fabian who believed that gradual reform could achieve what revolution would destroy. He was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics and the Soviet Union, positions that have complicated his legacy. He died on November 2, 1950, at ninety-four, after falling while pruning a tree in his garden. His will funded a campaign to reform the English alphabet, which went nowhere.