Shaw, Bernard

Autor: Shaw, Bernard
Rok: 1856-1950

Biogr./Hist. údaje: Anglický dramatik, prozaik a esejista irského původu.
Zdroj: Autoritní databáze Národní knihovny ČR

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was a Nobel-Prize-winning Irish playwright, critic and passionate socialist whose influence on Western theater, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950, at 94 one of the world's most famous men.Originally earning his way as an influential London music and theater critic, Shaw's greatest gift was for the modern drama. He wrote more than 60 plays, among them Man and Superman, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Major Barbara, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion. With his range from biting contemporary satire to historical allegory, Shaw became the leading comedy dramatist of his generation and one of the most important playwrights in the English language since the 17th century."Shaw was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift, the most readable music critic in English, the best theatre critic of his generation, a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects, and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature," sums up Stanley Weintraub in the Encyclopædia Britannica. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925.As a young man raised in poverty, Shaw embraced socialism and became an early and lifelong force in the Fabian Society, a highly influential British organization, founded in 1884, to promote a gradual, as opposed to revolutionary, socialism and as such became the foundation for the British Labour Party in 1900. He tirelessly wrote and spoke on behalf of its wide-ranging vision to transform British society, advocating a minimum wage for the working-class, universal healthcare, women's right to vote, pacifism and the abolition of hereditary privilege. He edited the classic text,"Fabian Essays in Socialism" (1889), and helped co-founders Sidney and Beatrice Webb create the London School of Economics and Political Science from a bequest by an early Fabian in 1895. He publicly opposed Britain's entry into both World Wars.He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize (Literature, 1925) and an Academy Award (Best Adapted Screenplay, 1938), the first for his contributions to literature and the second for his film adaptation of his most popular play, Pygmalion. The story of a picky British linguist who turns a Cockney flower girl into a lady was immortalized after his death in the 1953 Broadway musical, My Fair Lady. Shaw refused all other awards and honours, including the offer of a knighthood.