George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw came from Dublin to London at twenty, failed as a novelist, succeeded as a music and drama critic, and from his late thirties wrote more than fifty plays that made the theatre a place for argument. Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion and Saint Joan are the ones the lists read, with their prefaces, which are often longer than the plays. A Fabian socialist, vegetarian and anti-vivisectionist, he refused most honours but accepted the Nobel Prize in 1925 and lived to ninety-four, still writing. Ibsen was his master and paradox his method.