George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 - 2 November 1950) was a Nobel-Prize-winning Irish playwright, critic and passionate socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950, at 94 one of the world's most famous men."Shaw was 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, that was 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.