Happy birthday, George Bernard Shaw

It is the birthday of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and an Academy Award for his screen adaptation of his play Pygmalion in 1938. Shaw was an outspoken socialist who championed the working class. His black comedy plays made fun of social ills as he dealt with such issues as class privilege, education, health care, marriage, government, and religion. Shaw's best-known work may be Pygmalion (1912), about a professor of phonetics who trains a Cockney flower girl to pass for a duchess. It was adapted for film twice and as the 1956 musical and 1964 film My Fair Lady. Other major works include Candida (1898), John Bull's Other Island (1904), Major Barbara (1905), Man and Superman (1905), Heartbreak House (1920), and Saint Joan (1923).