George Bernard Shaw

Born in Dublin in 1856, Shaw moved to London at twenty and spent years failing as a novelist while teaching himself to think. By the mid-1880s he'd found his voice as a theatre critic and joined the Fabian Society, writing pamphlets for gradual socialism. His first stage success came in 1894 with Arms and the Man; influenced by Ibsen, he used drama as a vehicle for his political and social ideas. Major Barbara, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan followed, earning him the Nobel Prize in 1925. He courted controversy constantly - promoting eugenics, denouncing both sides in the First World War, and by the late 1920s praising Mussolini and Stalin after abandoning Fabian gradualism. He won an Oscar for the Pygmalion screenplay in 1938, refused the Order of Merit in 1946, and kept writing until weeks before his death in 1950 at ninety-four. He's regularly ranked second only to Shakespeare among British playwrights.