George Bernard Shaw was born on July 26, 1856 in Dublin, in a lower-middle class family of Scottish-Protestant ancestry. His father was a failed corn-merchant, with a drinking problem; his mother was a professional singer. When Shaw was sixteenth, his mother left her husband and son. Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, completing his schooling (which he hated passionately), and working as a clerk for an estate office (which he hated just as much as school).

In 1876, Shaw left Dublin moving in with his mother. There he pursued a career in journalism and writing.

In 1891 Shaw wrote his first play, Widower's Houses. For the next twelve years, he wrote close to a dozen plays, though he generally failed to persuade the managers of the London Theatres to produce them.

In 1898, after a serious illness, Shaw resigned as theatre critic, and moved out of his mother's house to marry Charlotte Payne-Townsend.

The outbreak of war in 1914 changed Shaw's life. For Shaw, the war represented the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. He expressed his opinions in a series of newspaper articles under the title Common Sense About the War. After the war, Shaw found his dramatic voice again and rebuilt his reputation, first with a series of five plays about "creative evolution," Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with Saint Joan. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Shaw lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity.

In 1950, Shaw fell off a ladder while trimming a tree on his property at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire, outside of London, and died a few days later of complications from the injury, at age 94.