He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). Lawrence in a house now called Shaw's Corner.

In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. He wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. In these works Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.Īn ardent socialist, Shaw was angered by what he perceived to be the exploitation of the working class. Nearly all his plays address prevailing social problems, but each also includes a vein of comedy that makes their stark themes more palatable. Over the course of his life he wrote more than 60 plays. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama. George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, socialist, and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most notably as the musical My Fair Lady and the film of that name. Shaw also would have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea, or Pygmalion Reversed. Gilbert, who wrote a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea first presented in 1871.

The general idea of that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion fell in love with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The play is a sharp lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary on women's independence.

Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1912. Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character.

Pygmalion author george bernard