George Bernard Shaw was born on 26th July 1856 at 3 (now 33) Synge Street, Dublin, the son of a failed grain merchant. His mother, a singer, took voice lessons from the singing master George Vandeleur Lee, with whom she struck up a close relationship and who subsequently brought the Shaws to live with him at a cottage in Killiney and a house at 1 Hatch Street which they shared. Shaw left school at the age of fifteen to become a clerk in a land agency, and when, the next year, Lee went to London followed by Mrs. Shaw and her two daughters, the youth was left with his father. Shaw spent his time in Dublin visiting The National Gallery in Merrion Square and pursuing his interest in music.

In 1876 Shaw left Dublin to join his mother and Lee in London, where several years of hack journalism and five novels earned him next to nothing. Attracted to socialism, he joined the newly formed Fabian Society in 1884, where with typical doggedness, he overcame his shyness to become a brilliant public speaker as well as the society's principal pamphleteer. He supplemented his income by becoming a reviewer of art, drama and music for several London journals, and in 1892 turned his hand to playwriting. His first few dramas, including "Widowers'Houses", "Mrs. Warren's Profession", "Arms and the Man" and "Caesar and Cleopatra", met with little success and his first real earnings from the stage only came in 1897 when the opening run of "The Devil's Disciple" in New York brought him £2,000 in royalties. In the same year his political career advanced with his election as vestryman for the St. Pancras local council. He was already a committed vegetarian and a wearer of woollen suits and championed many issues relating to health and pacifism. In 1898, he was married to Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy Irishwoman whom he had met through the Fabian Society and who nursed him through a period of ill-health. They lived at the village of Ayot St. Lawrence, north of London.

In 1904, Shaw's only play on an Irish theme, "John Bull's Other Island", was premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. A comedy which inverted the usual traditions of stage Irishism, it amused Edward VII so much that he broke his chair laughing. "Man and Superman", staged in 1905, dramatised his concept of creative evolution and the Life Force; "Major Barbara" (1905) set up a confrontation between idealism and plutocracy and "The Doctor's Dilemma" (1906) was Shaw's revenge for his mistreatment by doctors in the past. Among the shorter plays which followed was "The Shrewing-up of Blanco Posnet", which was banned in Britain for blasphemy and heriocally produced in 1909 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre, where it was reviewed by James Joyce. Shaw did not see the theatre merely as popular entertainment but as an arena of instruction. The themes-prostitution, religion, economics, war and politics-reflected social realities; the wit and eloquence which characterised them gave style to the substance and sugar to the pill. Many of the plays were published with long and entertaining prefaces.

Shaw was opposed to the First World War both as a humanist and as a socialist. He protested against executions of the leaders of the Easter Rising and his passionate defence of Roger Casement did not improve his popularity in England. His views were more welcome, however, after the war. "Heartbreak House", his own favourite work, opened in New York in 1920 and in 1923 "Saint Joan", generally considered to be his greatest play, was performed to enormous critical acclaim. Written on the occasion of Joan of Arc's canonisation, it portrayed her as a person ahead of her time and a champion of the right to private judgement, and earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1924. The award reflected his status as the principal creator of twentieth-century theatre.

He spent his later years lecturing, broadcasting and editing numerous collected works. With Yeats, he founded the Irish Academy of Letters in 1936 and he was made a Freeman of the city of Dublin in 1946. At his death in 1950, his house was given to the National Trust and a considerable bequest went to the National Gallery of Ireland in recognition of the education it had given him.