GEORGE BERNARD SHAW - the father of Modern English Literature

George Bernard Shaw is widely known as the father of Modern English Literature. This great writer was born on 26th July in 1856 in Dublin. He was not from any well-off family. His father's name is George Carr Shaw and he was a habitual drinker. Although his father was a habitual drinker but he had a good sense of humour. His mother was an enlightened woman endowed with a talent of singing.
George Bernard Shaw inherited his father's sense of humour & his mother's enlightened imagination. And those two things helped him to be a great artist. He had a huge hates for alcohol and poverty. He had formal education and he was sent to the church for religious knowledge but he gained much of his knowledge by his self education. He had to start working in a land agent's office at the age of only fifteen. Meanwhile, his parents were separated. His mother shifted to London and started to live there as a music teacher. But Shaw decided to stay with his father.

George Bernard Shaw moved to London at the age of twenty ending his job as a clerk. In London, he joined a telephone company but quickly left it. He decided to be a writer and as a result, in the years from 1879 to 1885 he wrote five novels. But it's a matter of great that none of the manuscripts was accepted by the publishers. In 1884, he joined the Fabian Society that means to reconstruct society in accordance with the highest moral principles and reducing the gap between the rich and the poor. 

Shaw's interest in drama made him progressed to write plays & his inspiration was the Norwegian playwright Henrick Ibsen.He started writing his own socially conscious plays.Shaw's dramatic activities cover a wide of field and include approximately fifty three plays. Some of his great plays as Arms & the Man, Candida, Saint Joans, The Apple Cart, The Doctor's Dilemma, Man & Superman etc.

In 1925, George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. He continued to write for the theatre till his death. In 1930, he found the authoritarian socialism of Stalin's Russia particularly attractive. In 1946, Penguin Books published ten volumes of his work. This great writer and playwright died on 2nd November in 1950 at the age of ninety.