In Memoriam: Seamus Heaney(1939-2013) | Irish America Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Lightenings viii The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air. The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill, A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. ‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’ The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it. —This poem was cited specifically by the Nobel Prize Committee Seamus Heaney was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature in Stockholm, Sweden last November, and all of Ireland was proud. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been Irish writers who had taken the prize before—W.B. Yeats, G.B. Shaw, and Samuel Beckett had all been honored—but the confirmation of Heaney was different.

Such institutions as the New York Times who consistently refer to Shaw as British, who also subliminally lay claim to Yeats by labeling him Anglo-Irish and place Beckett outside the realm of Irish, could make no such claim of Heaney, as both the work and person are unmistakably of Ireland. The award was given to Heaney “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” And as a poet he returns again and again to excavate the rural landscape of his upbringing. Born on April 13, 1939, the eldest of nine children, to Margaret and Patrick Heaney, at the family farm in Mossbawn, County Derry, the poet remembered his upbringing in his Nobel acceptance speech: In the 1940s, when I was the eldest child of an ever-growing family in rural County Derry, we crowded together in the three rooms of a traditional thatched farmstead and lived a kind of den-life which was more or less emotionally and intellectually proofed against the outside world.

It was an intimate, physical, creaturely existence in which the night sounds of the horse in the stable beyond one bedroom wall mingles with the sounds of adult conversation from the kitchen beyond the other…. After attending the local school at Anahorish, Heaney studied at Queens University in Belfast—his father referred to him as a “scholarship boy”—and graduated with a degree in English in 1961. He earned a teaching certificate at St. Joseph’s College in Belfast the following year, and went on to lecture in English at the same school. It was during this time that he began to write, publishing in school magazines under the pseudonym Incertus. In the mid-1960s, Heaney published Eleven Poems. He married Marie Devlin in 1965, and a year later became a lecturer in modern English literature at Queens University, the same year that Faber and Faber published his collection Death of a Naturalist, which won the E.C. Gregory Award, the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.

During this period Heaney and his wife had two sons, Michael (1965) and Christopher (1968). Heaney struggled long and hard with the complexity of the situation in Northern Ireland at the time, and eventually decided to leave his home. “What I was longing for was not quite stability but an active escape from the quicksand of relativism, a way of crediting poetry without anxiety or apology,” he said. In 1969, his second of ten volumes of poems, Door into the Dark, was published, and in 1970 Heaney and his family moved to Berkeley, California, where he was a guest lecturer at the University of California. He returned to the North in 1971, but a year later resigned his position at Queens University and moved to the Republic. “So It was that I found myself in the mid-1970s in another small house, this time in County Wicklow, south of Dublin, with a young family of my own,” Heaney said. In 1972, Heaney published Wintering Out, and the following year his daughter, Catherine, was born.

During this period, Heaney won many awards, gave readings in England and the U.S., and edited two poetry anthologies. He began teaching at Dublin’s Carysfort College in 1975, and six years later took the position of visiting professor at Harvard University. Three more collections of his work were published during this time—Field Work, Selected Poems, and Preoccupations: Selected Prose. By 1984, Heaney’s Station Island had been published, and he had been elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. The deaths of his parents—his mother in 1984 and his father in 1987—had great influence on Heaney’s work, and were reflected in The Haw Lantern (1987) and Seeing Things (1991). His series of sonnets titled “Clearances” were written as a memorial to his mother.

Although Heaney has not lived in Northern Ireland for some 25 years, there has always been a link between his writings and the tragic situation which plays itself out there, and it seems only fitting that lines from his 1990 play, The Cure at Troy, should come to embody the hope of a nation in the wake of the IRA and loyalist cease-fires in 1994: History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Heaney spoke of “poetry’s power to do the thing which always is and always be to poetry’s credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.” Seamus Heaney, for many years, has given voice to a struggling nation. Patricia Harty spoke with him in New York.

*** IRISH AMERICA: How has your winning the Nobel Prize affected your life? SEAMUS HEANEY: It hasn’t changed my life, it has intensified aspects of it. Over the last ten years the demand to give lectures, to be present at cultural events, to open exhibitions, to do social and cultural duties—all of things that come with the business of being a writer—have multiplied drastically. So luckily I had got myself to set up to deal with all that. I have a place [in Wicklow] where I go to get away from it. Marie and I do have privacy at home [in Dublin] because the decorum of people is magnificent. There’s acknowledgement and recognition, but a minimum of intrusion. Of course, something has changed because the word “Nobel” is a magic wand that is waved over you. But the actual day-to-day is just more busy, busy, busy. IA: What does it mean to call yourself a poet? SH: I think that if you call yourself a poet it means that you live by it, so to speak, and for it, in a very serious way. There’s a phrase of Ted Hughes which I like very much.

He said that the true poem emerges from the place of ultimate suffering and decision in us, and I think if you call yourself a poet, you publicly consecrate yourself to living somehow by the places of suffering and decision. IA: How does it feel to have the world reflect back at you that yes, indeed, you are a poet? SH: I think the discipline which writers must perfect is the discipline of doubting the world, the discipline of self knowledge and self-castigation. Certainly the activity should induce a sense of vigilance—it’s a kind of spiritual exaction to be a writer. But the answer is that I accept the recognition in good faith. IA: I find that reading your poetry can sometimes evoke painful memories. Is the creation itself painful? SH: No, the creation of it is pleasurable. I’m sure that Beckett enjoyed doing his most painful work too. I think the sine qua non of the activity is some form of joy in the actual doing—it’s the bringing into alignment of the form, of delight and expression, bringing that together with the actual endured reality of life that gives you the balance.

Take a novel by John McGahern where there is a kind of undertow of suffered life and a certain desolation, but there’s also the cello music of the writing itself. Composition is a pleasure when it’s going right, but when it’s not working it’s just sheer agony because then you’re having dry hoaks. IA: Did you always have an instinct that this was what you wanted to do? SH: I didn’t have an instinct, no. When I look back on that long ache that was my adolescence (and everybody else’s adolescence) I realize that I certainly had some artistic yearnings. I had a real desire to be able to play music, and I remember just wishing—there was no resentment here, by the way—wishing for access to music, to be able to play the piano, maybe. I was also in my late teens and early 20s working with marquetry—making pictures from wood and so on—so there was some desire for artistic expression. Writing poems did give me a sense of myself, it verified something in me. There’s a psychic verification that artwork performs for the artist, and gradually I realized that writing was something that I could do.

IA: What was it that allowed this talent to flourish? SH: Acceptance early on by editors I didn’t know when I was totally unknown myself. My first poems were written in—obscurity is the wrong word—just nowhere-ness. Obscurity somehow implies that you are being kept out of the light. I was in Belfast, I had no literary contacts, but I had aspirations. And the fact that the poems were accepted by the Irish Times, Kilkenny Magazine, and the Belfast Telegraph in three months was terrific. Publication for a young writer is a crucial transition, it’s a rite of passage. You go from the unwritten state to the slight mystery of seeing your name in print. I was very lucky in that even my book was sent for, I didn’t have to tout it. Faber, before I had a manuscript ready, wrote to me. IA: How did that change things for you? SH: When your book is published and then well-received, you have created a textual creature with the same name as yourself and it’s recognized as a reflection of you, then you begin to be discussed as that creature out there.

Now, in the beginning that is gratifying but gradually it becomes a haunting, and you have to develop a second relationship with that doppelganger, one of nonchalant indifference. In fact, you have to eventually discover a place to live completely separate from it—to let him continue his life in the world. That’s where I am now. IA: Is it affecting you now? SH: Yea, I have to continue in spite of it, you know? But it’s not, as my mother used to say about pregnancy, a killing condition. IA: Can you tell me about your mother? SH: My mother was very strong—very unruffable, steady on the emotional keel. Righteous and majestic and vulnerable, her McCann family were terrific, they had the volubility of protest—they were democrats. My father had a different kind of majesty, the country farmer’s silence and hauter. My mother had an unbending thing which she shared with women of that generation, a child a year in eight, nine, ten years years.

The giving-birth factor involved, I suppose, a wilful adherence to the compensations of Catholicism—the cult of the suffering mother of Jesus, the cult of the suffering Jesus, and the cult of St. Anne, the mother of Mary. These were actual real psychic resources for sublimation in the lives of women. In particular, for ones who were going through, without much consolation or understanding, the solitude and exhaustion of childbirth and child-rearing and the biological entrapment of being in a place with no birth control. Nowadays I remember that affirmative bold outcry of prayers from women in church as a cry of rage and defiance. My mother wouldn’t have put it that way—she would have seen it as a form of transport and endurance. IA: Was it hard being a different type of man than your father? SH: Well, I suppose there are two answers. It was not all hard socially, because there I was the scholarship boy, going to boarding school, and that path was mapped out.

My father would just have said, “The teachers say he’s a smart chap.” Now, my father never, never advised me about anything, but I had a sense of his vigilance, his instinctive judgement not judgemental, more concerned and wise. He had a protective care. After I reached the age of 14 or 15 he just assumed I would choose my path, so there was no difficulty. Any difficulties were actually of the species rather than the biography—of sons growing up and fathers being there. It’s a Freudian generality I suppose. IA: How did you manage to break with tradition and leave the farm? SH: I never actually experienced it as a break. Whatever your background, poetry is going to be an extra-ness and a strangeness. Each poet is alone with his or her chances at the end as much as at the beginning. In some way, the farm background is like a mythic possession; you know what neolithic life was like if you have known rural life in pre-modern Ireland. And that is a great creative resource. A kind of dream-knowledge.

I mean, creative is such a cant word, it’s just the ability to make something of the game—to keep moving it along, wakening it up and shifting it. Joseph Brodsky said a marvelous thing about poetry, that it wasn’t merely an art, it was an anthropological necessity because it prompted new possibilities for the destiny of the soul. IA: Were you surprised at the Poem that was cited by the Nobel Committee, “Lightenings”? SH: You mean the one about the monks at Clonmacnoise have the vision of a boat in the air above them? I was delighted with that, because the thing is a kind of image of poetry itself. It’s about the negotiation that goes on in everybody’s life between what is envisaged and what is endured—between the dream up there and the doings down here. It has the mysterious purchase of a good story but also it’s pregnant with suggestion. I think it’s about poetry, maybe that is why they cited it. IA: There seems to be something in the Irish that makes them partial to poetry. SH: There’s a tradition, a value system which is given, an historical myth or truth that predisposes us as a community and as individuals to trust in poetry.

It’s a reality, there’s no doubt about it. If a poet published a poem in a newspaper in Ireland the judges will read it, the afternoon drinkers in the pub will read it, the Taoiseach will read it, the Protestant bishop will read it, the Catholic bishop will read it, the hostesses will read it, the gossip columnists will read it, and the name of the poet will be a possession. I think it’s a matter of some indifference whether they are equipped in any special literary way to read or judge poetry. We are talking about the actual role of the poet in society, and in Ireland there is no doubt that that role is alive and it contrasts vividly with what will happen in a poet publishes a poem in the Times of London, or in the New York Times. So fearful as I am of talking up romantic notions about Ireland, I think you have to concede that there is public, psychic and artistic reality in this which is a genuine positive cultural possession of the country. IA: You are the first Irish Catholic to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. How important is Catholicism to you?

SH: I realize now that from the age of dawning of consciousness to the age of reason, or from about six months to age twelve, I was totally immersed in the religious sense of the world. In the world I grew up in, the mass was the social event of the week. The priest was one of the ruling class. And then when you went to college, you were already dealing with a mini-Maynooth. The whole sense of morality, right and wrong, everything was based on Catholicism, and it continued when you went to confession, weekly or monthly (in college it was communion daily), right through til your early 20s and the next drama of consciousness began as you started to secularize yourself in response to the world. Obviously, I could talk until the cows come home about the minority status of Catholics in the North of Ireland, but that ground has been gone over a lot. I would say that the more important Catholic thing is the actual sense of eternal values and infamous vices which our education or formation gives us. There’s a sense of profoundness, a sense that the universe can be ashimmer with something, and Catholicism—even if I don’t like sentimentalizing it—was the backdrop to that whole thing.

The world I grew up in offered me a sense that I was a citizen of the empyrean—the crystalline elsewhere of the world. But I think that’s gone from Catholicism now. IA: You led a double life in that in addition to writing you also taught school. How did you manage both? SH: I never conceived of a way of life where my writing vocations would actually be my whole life. This may have been a mistake—I’m talking now about a given ethic or attitude, one that didn’t deconstruct in myself. In the world I came out of—and it was inside me from the beginning and almost to the end—the general idea was that you worked for a living. You earned your keep, you asked for no special favors and you then prayed that grace would visit you. Laboring at your job doesn’t infuse you with the grace of poetry, but I thought of them as two separate things—one is the mystery of gift, and the other is getting on with it, conducting yourself as a citizen. I certainly didn’t think that if you were involved with the mystery of writing you had any right to expect better treatment or any special status as a citizen.

That was a solidarity, I suppose, with the kind of unliterary life that I lived in the beginning. And then while I was teaching there was a desire to prove that poetry wasn’t effete or a betrayal of loyalty to humble origin. So my teaching at school was a defense of poetry as part of the fabric of the usual life. You demystified it, you toned it down and you called people towards it by saying, “look, it’s quite simple.” I have now come to realize that this too is misrepresenting things and that you should stand up for strangeness, the otherness and the challenges of this stuff. Whereas at the beginning I was more interested in bringing an audience towards it and calming their nerves, now I’m more interested in saying, “Down on your knees, this is the goods!” IA: Did you enjoy teaching? SH: I never enjoyed thinking about it, but I actually enjoyed doing it. It takes a long time for teachers to get over their self-preoccupation—will I be able to do it? People underestimate the sickening dread that can be in somebody as they stand up on a podium to begin a class. It’s hard for me to do a lecture to this day.

I’m tense and I’m worried and I’m up early preparing it. So the answer to the question is ambivalence. I enjoy doing it when I’m doing it, but I don’t enjoy thinking about it. IA: In terms of your own writing, are you very disciplined or do you wait for the muse? SH: I’m not very disciplined, no. I’m half disciplined. I’m not a person who gets up every morning at the same time and sits at a desk and plunges into it. Prose writers have to do that. On the other hand, the older I get the more I feel that you should peg out a pitch and provide space for the game to be played, mark out a landing place for the muse if she wants to come down. So time, time alone, when the pages are in front of you, or you’re reading, time is what’s important. In the beginning, I used to say to myself anything that’s worthwhile forces itself through. And to some extent that’s true.

But my life has become so besieged with different responsibilities… The last decade and a half of lecturing and teaching at Harvard and Oxford—it’s also just a matter of growing older—the world places many, many demands on you so you have to be wary and in resistance to it and secure a space where poetry can come through. My redemption has been Wicklow, the actual house is 45 minutes from my Dublin home—it’s both a physical reality and psychic image of retreat. When I go there I feel gathered and safe and under cover. IA: After the ceasefire was announced you write that you felt 25 years younger, but you were angry also at the 25 years of loss. You mentioned the inroads that were being made before the violence, when both traditions were finding “room to rhyme”. SH: I felt the whole set of nascent politics has been obliterated from memory by what happened. There had been something in the air—it was the 60s taking on a special shape in Northern Ireland. There was a political shifting. This much younger generation of unionists was coming along—God knows they wouldn’t have been ideologically soft—but they had a social conscience of a different sort.

But I think the other thing that happened to me after the ceasefire was some kind of anger that I had suppressed in myself for years. It wasn’t anger at any one person or group, it was just the conditions—there’s a poem in The Spirit Level called “Mycenae Lookout” which is written from the point of view of the watchman during the Trojan war, and it was written out of this feeling. I always wanted to write about the watchman and I now realize that this poem is angry. IA: How do you feel now? SH: Obviously I think that the British government has been thick-witted and caught in a cultural and political posture that they can’t shake. I thought that the two months after the ceasefire offered a moment of genuine historic possibility which everyone expected Major to grasp. Reynolds and Hume were grasping the hands of Adams—they actually deliberately and tactically said “Let’s go.” And of course, Major hesitated and then hesitation became a funk. But for a while a possibility that had lurked in the political unconscious of the unionists allowed itself into their consciousness. They were aware that some change might be about to happen, and if that moment had been grasped history would have moved along.

Now all that is past and I think that is the real tragedy of it. Now we’re just in the realm of mess and while mess is admittedly preferable to atrocity, I think it’ll drag on tediously, demeaningly. It’s just the usual tactics of politics, hacking it out along party political lines; they harry each other from the touchlines of their own positions. It’s so exhausting for the citizens and it’s so unpromising, but it’s the usual. I don’t think anything will be quickly resolved, everything will be messily deferred and deferred. IA: Do you have any regrets about leaving the North? SH: No, I’ve no regrets. It was actually transitional at the time I left—I had to make a move. IA: Do you feel like James Joyce who went off into exile? SH: Well, he went off in dudgeon. I didn’t leave in any form of dudgeon or resentment; I left because of a desire to be freer within myself, or simply to be more alone. This was not political, this was artistic and domestic. Moving to Wicklow was a crucial moment.

Our own lives (I mean Marie’s life as well as mine) were reconstituted emotionally by going into a lonely place together. And it was very fortifying for the two of us. You took the measure of things again and started up again. IA: Tell me about California. SH: They were the best years of our lives, 1970, 1971—very important. It was the first time we had lived outside of Ireland, and Berkeley was a place of great promise and merriment. A place of reorientation after Belfast—Belfast was so radical, so downbeat, so corrective of any form of flourish—it was great to go to California where flourish was encouraged, where instead of refusal and irony there was indulgence. It was like going into a hot-house for the spirit. IA: Did you ever think of staying there? SH: Never, no. But I loved California, partly because it was such a helpful year for us. IA: Do you think it’s essential to your poetry to live in Ireland? SH: I don’t think it’s essential but—I don’t know the answer.

The last 25 years have been so stressful and crucial it would seem to me that I couldn’t have knit myself into something workable without staying in Ireland. IA: Do you still see yourself as a citizen of the North? SH: The image I have is of the ripple going out, which is an image you can find in Joyce’s work. For him it was Sallins, Kildare, Ireland, British Isles, Europe, the universe; for me it was Derry, St. Columb’s, Queens, Berkeley, Wicklow, Harvard, Oxford—it’s the same sort of ripple. There’s a part of you that’s still an extension of the original self moving at the circumference of your adult cognition and realization. There’s something out there that is actually continuous with your first awareness. Your consciousness is such a strange, strange thing; it’s hard to talk about the inwardness of it—it’s both fixed from the beginning and yet at the same time it’s capable of taking in experience and newness.

So I see myself as a big set of ripples, because if you look at the ripples in a pool when the stone is first throne in you can see them going out in big rings, but then at a certain point it looks like they are also going in towards the center. The circumference represents some form of knowledge. On the other hand, you always have to work with that which was there at the core from the beginning. I’m still writing about that. It’s just your perspective on your imaginative possessions changes. Your perspective on your cultural and emotional possessions changes. This negotiation between the center and the circumference, that’s where I live anyway. *** From Whatever You Say Say Nothing ‘Religion’s never mentioned here,’ of course. ‘You know them by their eyes,’ and hold your tongue. ‘One side’s as bad as the other,’ never worse. Christ, it’s near time that some small leak was sprung In the great dykes the Dutchman made To dam the dangerous tide that followed Seamus. Yet for all this art and sedentary trade I am incapable. The famous Northern reticence, the tight gag of place And times: yes, yes.

Of the ‘wee six’ I sing Where to be saved you only must save face And whatever you say, you say nothing. Blackberry-Picking Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate the first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wide: summer’s blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full, Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered With thorn pricks, out palms sticky as Bluebeard’s. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too.

Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not. Postscript And some time to make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the unearthed lightning of a flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. One Response to “In Memoriam: Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)” Thank you for this precious article..what a good interview especially the question of what is a poet?

This is the poem I wrote for Seamus.

Dear beloved soul brother as they lay you down to rest I will take up pen and write a poem for you and yours Bellagy boy man yellow bittern you will always sing the soul song of the north of ireland for you are all it you and your way with turn of phrase and wit of gem you told us who we were and why between the lines we breathe the fresh air of sheets blown in the wind hung on your mammy’s clothes line outside in the yard Seamus beloved soul brother there will be no goodbyes for you have left the essence of yourself with us forever for you have finished the book of life and now you get to wake up to the big cosmic world of the one breath I am sure they all came to meet you your mammy your daddy and the little brother along with dogs and maybe a cat or two and lots of birds and cows for you are in heaven in eternal bliss where no words are needed for you the very breath of life itself I will see you everywhere now in wind and rain in the dance before me of nature you will be there as sure as day follows night you will be there and you will visit all the freedom fighters who died catholic protestant it never mattered to you anyway trival things like that never did but death mattered

 you never mentioned much about the war at all you cared deeply and felt the sorrow of the years you felt the bombs and the stench of death as only a poet can do and you wrote them lines to help to heal the sorrow of the past dear man of god you put pen to paper so often in your name you did you sent me a postcard years ago to say my poetry did you good and I read and reread everyword until it pestered me so much I threw in it the fire and forgot to look at the picture of the frontside you quoted thomas the rhymer and like he said i will dance on your grave yes my soul brother i will dance on your grave and drink a toast too for you were my articultator always to the north George Bernard Shaw | Penny's poetry pages Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia ::: Socialism and Fabianism in the United Kingdom, Colin Wilson , Kurt Vonnegut George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) [1] was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics .

Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism , in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism , his main talent was for drama , and he wrote more than 60 plays . Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society . He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council . He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion (adaptation of his play of the same name ), respectively.

[2] Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public honours, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English. [3] Contents Edit George Bernard Shaw was born in Synge Street, Dublin, in 1856 to George Carr Shaw (1814–85), an unsuccessful grain merchant and sometime civil servant, and Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, née Gurly (1830–1913), a professional singer. He had two sisters, Lucinda Frances (1853–1920), a singer of musical comedy and light opera, and Elinor Agnes (1855–76). Education Edit Shaw briefly attended the Wesley College, Dublin , a grammar school operated by the Methodist Church in Ireland , before moving to a private school near Dalkey and then transferring to Dublin's Central Model School. He ended his formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School.

He harboured a lifelong animosity toward schools and teachers, saying: "Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents". [4] In the astringent prologue to Cashel Byron's Profession young Byron's educational experience is a fictionalized description of Shaw's own schooldays. Later, he painstakingly detailed the reasons for his aversion to formal education in his Treatise on Parents and Children. [5] In brief, he considered the standardized curricula useless, deadening to the spirit and stifling to the intellect. He particularly deplored the use of corporal punishment, which was prevalent in his time. When his mother left home and followed her voice teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, to London , Shaw was almost sixteen years old. His sisters accompanied their mother [6] but Shaw remained in Dublin with his father, first as a reluctant pupil, then as a clerk in an estate office. He worked efficiently, albeit discontentedly, for several years. [7] In 1876, Shaw joined his mother's London household.

She, Vandeleur Lee, and his sister Lucy, provided him with a pound a week while he frequented public libraries and the British Museum reading room where he studied earnestly and began writing novels. He earned his allowance by ghostwriting Vandeleur Lee's music column, [8] [9] which appeared in the London Hornet. His novels were rejected, however, so his literary earnings remained negligible until 1885, when he became self-supporting as a critic of the arts. Personal life and political activism File:Shaw's Corner1.jpg Influenced by his reading, he became a dedicated Socialist and a charter member of the Fabian Society , [10] a middle class organization established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread of socialism by peaceful means. [7] In the course of his political activities he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend , an Irish heiress and fellow Fabian; they married in 1898.

The marriage was never consummated, at Charlotte's insistence, though he had had a number of affairs with married women; [11] Shaw declined to stand as an MP, but in 1897 he was elected as a local councillor to the London County Council as a Progressive. [12] In 1906 the Shaws moved into a house, now called Shaw's Corner , in Ayot St. Lawrence , a small village in Hertfordshire , England; it was to be their home for the remainder of their lives, although they also maintained a residence at 29 Fitzroy Square in London. Shaw's plays were first performed in the 1890s. By the end of the decade he was an established playwright. He wrote sixty-three plays and his output as novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist and private correspondent was prodigious. He is known to have written more than 250,000 letters.

[13] Along with Fabian Society members Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Graham Wallas , Shaw founded the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895 with funding provided by private philanthropy, including a bequest of £20,000 from Henry Hunt Hutchinson to the Fabian Society. One of the libraries at the LSE is named in Shaw's honor; it contains collections of his papers and photographs. [14] Final years Edit During his later years, Shaw enjoyed attending to the grounds at Shaw's Corner. He died at the age of 94, of renal failure precipitated by injuries incurred by falling while pruning a tree. [15] His ashes, mixed with those of his wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend , were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden. [16] Career Edit See Works by George Bernard Shaw for listings of his novels and plays, with links to their electronic texts, if those exist. The International Shaw Society provides a detailed chronological listing of Shaw's writings. [17] See also George Bernard Shaw, Unity Theatre.

[18] Criticism Edit Shaw became a critic of the arts when, sponsored by William Archer , he joined the reviewing staff of the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. [19] There he wrote under the pseudonym "Corno di Bassetto" (" basset horn ")—chosen because it sounded European and nobody knew what a corno di bassetto was. In a miscellany of other periodicals, including Dramatic Review (1885–86), Our Corner (1885–86), and the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–88) his byline was "GBS". [20] From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the drama critic for Frank Harris' Saturday Review , in which position he campaigned brilliantly to displace the artificialities and hypocrisies of the Victorian stage with a theatre of actuality and thought. His earnings as a critic made him self-supporting as an author and his articles for the Saturday Review made his name well-known.

George Bernard Shaw was highly critical of productions of Shakespeare, and specifically denounced the dramatic practice of editing Shakespeare’s plays, whose scenes tended to be cut in order to create “acting versions”. He notably held famous 19th-century actor Sir Henry Irving in contempt for this practice, as he expressed in one of his reviews: “In a true republic of art, Sir Henry Irving would ere this have expiated his acting versions on the scaffold. He does not merely cut plays; he disembowels them. In Cymbeline he has quite surpassed himself by extirpating the antiphonal third verse of the famous dirge. A man who would do that would do anything –cut the coda out of the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or shorten one of Velasquez ’s Philips into a kitcat to make it fit over his drawing room mantelpiece.” Shavian scholar John F. Matthews credits him, as a result, with the disappearance of the two-hundred-year-old tradition of editing Shakespeare into “acting versions”. [21] He had a very high regard for both Irish stage actor Barry Sullivan 's and Johnston Forbes-Robertson 's Hamlets , but despised John Barrymore 's.

Barrymore invited him to see a performance of his celebrated Hamlet, and Shaw graciously accepted, but wrote Barrymore a withering letter in which he all but tore the performance to shreds. Even worse, Shaw had seen the play in the company of Barrymore's then wife, but did not dare voice his true feelings about the performance aloud to her. [22] Much of Shaw's music criticism, ranging from short comments to the book-length essay The Perfect Wagnerite , extols the work of the German composer Richard Wagner . [23] Wagner worked 25 years composing Der Ring des Nibelungen , a massive four-part musical dramatization drawn from the Teutonic mythology of gods, giants, dwarves and Rhine maidens; Shaw considered it a work of genius and reviewed it in detail. Beyond the music, he saw it as an allegory of social evolution where workers, driven by "the invisible whip of hunger", seek freedom from their wealthy masters. Wagner did have socialistic sympathies, as Shaw carefully points out, but made no such claim about his opus.

Conversely, Shaw disparaged Brahms , deriding A German Requiem by saying "it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker". [24] Although he found Brahms lacking in intellect, he praised his musicality, saying "...nobody can listen to Brahms' natural utterance of the richest absolute music, especially in his chamber compositions, without rejoicing in his natural gift". In the 1920s, he recanted, calling his earlier animosity towards Brahms "my only mistake". [23] Shaw's writings about music gained great popularity because they were understandable to the average well-read audience member of the day, thus contrasting starkly with the dourly pretentious pedantry of most critiques in that era. [25] All of his music critiques have been collected in Shaw's Music. [26] As a drama critic for the Saturday Review, a post he held from 1895 to 1898, Shaw championed Henrik Ibsen whose realistic plays scandalized the Victorian public. His influential Quintessence of Ibsenism was written in 1891.

[27] Novels File:George Bernard Shaw 1925.jpg The first to be printed was Cashel Byron's Profession (1886), [28] which was written in 1882. Its eponymous character, Cashel, a rebellious schoolboy with an unsympathetic mother, runs away to Australia where he becomes a famed prizefighter. He returns to England for a boxing match, and falls in love with erudite and wealthy Lydia Carew. Lydia, drawn by sheer animal magnetism, eventually consents to marry despite the disparity of their social positions. This breach of propriety is nullified by the unpresaged discovery that Cashel is of noble lineage and heir to a fortune comparable to Lydia's. With those barriers to happiness removed, the couple settles down to prosaic family life with Lydia dominant; Cashel attains a seat in Parliament. In this novel Shaw first expresses his conviction that productive land and all other natural resources should belong to everyone in common, rather than being owned and exploited privately. The book was written in the year when Shaw first heard the lectures of Henry George who advocated such reforms.

Written in 1883, An Unsocial Socialist was published in 1887. [29] The tale begins with a hilarious description of student antics at a girl's school then changes focus to a seemingly uncouth laborer who, it soon develops, is really a wealthy gentleman in hiding from his overly affectionate wife. He needs the freedom gained by matrimonial truancy to promote the socialistic cause, to which he is an active convert. Once the subject of socialism emerges, it dominates the story, allowing only space enough in the final chapters to excoriate the idle upper class and allow the erstwhile schoolgirls, in their earliest maturity, to marry suitably. Love Among the Artists was published in the United States in 1900 and in England in 1914, [30] but it was written in 1881. In the ambiance of chit-chat and frivolity among members of Victorian polite society a youthful Shaw describes his views on the arts, romantic love and the practicalities of matrimony. Dilettantes, he thinks, can love and settle down to marriage, but artists with real genius are too consumed by their work to fit that pattern.

The dominant figure in the novel is Owen Jack, a musical genius, somewhat mad and quite bereft of social graces. From an abysmal beginning he rises to great fame and is lionized by socialites despite his unremitting crudity. The Irrational Knot was written in 1880 and published in 1905. [31] Within a framework of leisure class preoccupations and frivolities Shaw disdains hereditary status and proclaims the nobility of workers. Marriage, as the knot in question, is exemplified by the union of Marian Lind, a lady of the upper class, to Edward Conolly, always a workman but now a magnate, thanks to his invention of an electric motor that makes steam engines obsolete. The marriage soon deteriorates, primarily because Marian fails to rise above the preconceptions and limitations of her social class and is, therefore, unable to share her husband's interests. Eventually she runs away with a man who is her social peer, but he proves himself a scoundrel and abandons her in desperate circumstances.

Her husband rescues her and offers to take her back, but she pridefully refuses, convinced she is unworthy and certain that she faces life as a pariah to her family and friends. The preface, written when Shaw was 49, expresses gratitude to his parents for their support during the lean years while he learned to write and includes details of his early life in London. Shaw's first novel, Immaturity, was written in 1879 but was the last one to be printed in 1931. [32] It relates tepid romances, minor misfortunes and subdued successes in the developing career of Robert Smith, an energetic young Londoner and outspoken agnostic. Condemnation of alcoholic behavior is the prime message in the book, and derives from Shaw's familial memories. This is made clear in the books's preface, which was written by the mature Shaw at the time of its belated publication. The preface is a valuable resource because it provides autobiographical details not otherwise available. Short stories File:George Bernard Shaw notebook.jpg A collection of Shaw's short stories, The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales , was published in 1934.

[33] The Black Girl, an enthusiastic convert to Christianity, goes searching for God. In the story, written as an allegory, somewhat reminiscent of Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress , Shaw uses her adventures to expose flaws and fallacies in the religions of the world. At the story's happy ending, the Black Girl quits her searchings in favor of rearing a family with the aid of a red-haired Irishman who has no metaphysical inclination. One of the Lesser Tales is The Miraculous Revenge (1885), which relates the misadventures of an alcoholic investigator while he probes the mystery of a graveyard—full of saintly corpses—that migrates across a stream to escape association with the body of a newly buried sinner. Plays Edit The texts of plays by Shaw mentioned in this section, with the dates when they were written and first performed can be found in Complete Plays and Prefaces. [34] Shaw began working on his first play destined for production, Widowers' Houses , in 1885 in collaboration with critic William Archer , who supplied the structure. Archer decided that Shaw could not write a play, so the project was abandoned.

Years later, Shaw tried again and, in 1892, completed the play without collaboration. Widowers' Houses, a scathing attack on slumlords, was first performed at London's Royalty Theatre on 9 December 1892. Shaw would later call it one of his worst works, but he had found his medium. His first significant financial success as a playwright came from Richard Mansfield 's American production of The Devil's Disciple (1897). He went on to write 63 plays, most of them full-length. Often his plays succeeded in the United States and Germany before they did in London. Although major London productions of many of his earlier pieces were delayed for years, they are still being performed there. Examples include Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893), Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894) and You Never Can Tell (1897). Shaw's plays, like those of Oscar Wilde , contained incisive humor, which was exceptional among playwrights of the Victorian era; both authors are remembered for their comedy.

[35] However, Shaw's wittiness should not obscure his important role in revolutionizing British drama. In the Victorian Era , the London stage had been regarded as a place for frothy, sentimental entertainment. Shaw made it a forum for considering moral, political and economic issues, possibly his most lasting and important contribution to dramatic art. In this, he considered himself indebted to Henrik Ibsen , who pioneered modern realistic drama, meaning drama designed to heighten awareness of some important social issue. Significantly, Widowers' Houses — an example of the realistic genre — was completed after William Archer, Shaw's friend, had translated some of Ibsen's plays to English and Shaw had written The Quintessence of Ibsensism. [36] As Shaw's experience and popularity increased, his plays and prefaces became more voluble about reforms he advocated, without diminishing their success as entertainments. Such works, including Caesar and Cleopatra (1898), Man and Superman (1903), Major Barbara (1905) and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), display Shaw's matured views, for he was approaching 50 when he wrote them.

From 1904 to 1907, several of his plays had their London premieres in notable productions at the Court Theatre, managed by Harley Granville-Barker and J. E. Vedrenne . The first of his new plays to be performed at the Court Theatre, John Bull's Other Island (1904), while not especially popular today, made his reputation in London when King Edward VII laughed so hard during a command performance that he broke his chair. [37] By the 1910s, Shaw was a well-established playwright. New works such as Fanny's First Play (1911) and Pygmalion (1912), had long runs in front of large London audiences. Shaw had permitted a musical adaptation of Arms and the Man (1894) called The Chocolate Soldier (1908), but he had a low opinion of German operetta. He insisted that none of his dialogue be used, and that all the character names be changed, although the operetta actually follows Shaw's plot quite closely, in particular preserving its anti-war message.

The work proved very popular and would have made Shaw rich had he not waived his royalties, but he detested it and for the rest of his life forbade musicalization of his work, including a proposed Franz Lehár operetta based on Pygmalion. Several of his plays formed the basis of musicals after his death—most famously the musical My Fair Lady —it is officially adapted from the screenplay of the film version of Pygmalion rather than the original stage play (keeping the film's ending), and librettist Alan Jay Lerner kept generous chunks of Shaw's dialogue, and the characters' names, unchanged. Shaw's outlook was changed by World War I, which he uncompromisingly opposed despite incurring outrage from the public as well as from many friends. His first full-length piece, presented after the War, written mostly during it, was Heartbreak House (1919). A new Shaw had emerged—the wit remained, but his faith in humanity had dwindled. In the preface to Heartbreak House he said: "It is said that every people has the Government it deserves.

It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orators of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will. Thus our democracy moves in a vicious circle of reciprocal worthiness and unworthiness." [38] File:Shaw's writing hut.jpg Shaw had previously supported gradual democratic change toward socialism, but now he saw more hope in government by benign strong men. This sometimes made him oblivious to the dangers of dictatorships. Near his life's end that hope failed him too. In the first act of Buoyant Billions (1946–48), his last full-length play, his protagonist asks: "Why appeal to the mob when ninetyfive per cent of them do not understand politics, and can do nothing but mischief without leaders? And what sort of leaders do they vote for?

For Titus Oates and Lord George Gordon with their Popish plots, for Hitlers who call on them to exterminate Jews, for Mussolinis who rally them to nationalist dreams of glory and empire in which all foreigners are enemies to be subjugated." [39] In 1921, Shaw completed Back to Methuselah , his "Metabiological Pentateuch". The massive, five-play work starts in the Garden of Eden and ends thousands of years in the future; it showcases Shaw's postulate that a "Life Force" directs evolution toward ultimate perfection by trial and error. Shaw proclaimed the play a masterpiece, but many critics disagreed. The theme of a benign force directing evolution reappears in Geneva (1938), wherein Shaw maintains humans must develop longer lifespans in order to acquire the wisdom needed for self-government. Methuselah was followed by Saint Joan (1923), which is generally considered to be one of his better works. Shaw had long considered writing about Joan of Arc , and her canonization in 1920 supplied a strong incentive. The play was an international success, and is believed to have led to his Nobel Prize in Literature.

[40] The citation praised his work as "...marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". At this time Prime Minister David Lloyd George was considering recommending to the King Shaw's admission to the Order of Merit , but the place was instead given to J. M. Barrie . [40] Shaw rejected a knighthood. [40] It was not until 1946 that the government of the day arranged for an informal offer of the Order of Merit to be made: Shaw declined, replying that "merit" in authorship could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history. [40] He wrote plays for the rest of his life, but very few of them are as notable—or as often revived—as his earlier work. The Apple Cart (1929) was probably his most popular work of this era. Later full-length plays like Too True to Be Good (1931), On the Rocks (1933), The Millionairess (1935), and Geneva (1938) have been seen as marking a decline.

His last significant play, In Good King Charles Golden Days has, according to St. John Ervine, [41] passages that are equal to Shaw's major works. Shaw's published plays come with lengthy prefaces. These tend to be more about Shaw's opinions on the issues addressed by the plays than about the plays themselves. Often his prefaces are longer than the plays they introduce. For example, the Penguin Books edition of his one-act The Shewing-up Of Blanco Posnet (1909) has a 67-page preface for the 29-page playscript. Polemics Edit In a letter to Henry James dated 17 January 1909, [42] Shaw said: "I, as a Socialist, have had to preach, as much as anyone, the enormous power of the environment. We can change it; we must change it; there is absolutely no other sense in life than the task of changing it. What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods." [43] Thus he viewed writing as a way to further his humanitarian and political agenda.

His works were very popular because of their comedic content, but the public tended to disregard his messages and enjoy his work as pure entertainment. He was acutely aware of that. His preface to Heartbreak House (1919) attributes the rejection to the need of post-World War I audiences for frivolities, after four long years of grim privation, more than to their inborn distaste of instruction. His crusading nature led him to adopt and tenaciously hold a variety of causes, which he furthered with fierce intensity, heedless of opposition and ridicule. For example, Common Sense about the War (1914) lays out Shaw's strong objections at the onset of World War I. [44] His stance ran counter to public sentiment and cost him dearly at the box-office, but he never compromised. [45] Shaw joined in the public opposition to vaccination against smallpox , calling it "a particularly filthy piece of witchcraft", [46] [47] despite having nearly died from the disease when he contracted it in 1881.

In the preface to Doctor’s Dilemma he made it plain he regarded traditional medical treatment as dangerous quackery that should be replaced with sound public sanitation, good personal hygiene and diets devoid of meat. Shaw became a vegetarian while he was twenty-five, after hearing a lecture by H.F. Lester. [48] In 1901, remembering the experience, he said "I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian." [49] As a staunch vegetarian, he was a firm anti-vivisectionist and antagonistic to cruel sports for the remainder of his life. The belief in the immorality of eating animals was one of the Fabian causes near his heart and is frequently a topic in his plays and prefaces.

His position, succinctly stated, was "A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses." [50] As well as plays and prefaces, Shaw wrote long political treatises, such as Fabian Essays in Socialism (1889), [51] and The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1912), [52] a 495-page book detailing all aspects of socialistic theory as Shaw interpreted it. Excerpts of the latter were republished in 1928 as Socialism and Liberty, [53] Late in his life he wrote another guide to political issues, Everybody's Political What's What (1944). Correspondence Edit Shaw corresponded with an array of people, many of them well-known. His letters to and from Mrs. Patrick Campbell were adapted for the stage by Jerome Kilty as Dear Liar: A Comedy of Letters, [54] as was his correspondence with the poet Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (the intimate friend of Oscar Wilde), into the drama Bernard and Bosie: A Most Unlikely Friendship by Anthony Wynn .

His letters to the prominent actress, Ellen Terry , [55] to the boxer Gene Tunney , [56] and to H.G. Wells , [57] have also been published. Eventually the volume of his correspondence became insupportable, as can be inferred from apologetic letters written by assistants. [58] Shaw campaigned against the executions of the rebel leaders of the Easter Rising , and he became a personal friend of the Cork -born IRA leader Michael Collins , whom he invited to his home for dinner while Collins was negotiating the Anglo-Irish Treaty with Lloyd George in London. After Collins's assassination in 1922, Shaw sent a personal message of condolence to one of Collins's sisters. He had an enduring friendship with G. K. Chesterton , the Roman Catholic-convert British writer. [59] Shaw also enjoyed a personal friendship with T.E. Lawrence , known most notably for his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom and his role as liaison for the Arab revolt during World War I. Lawrence even used the name "Shaw" as his nom de guerre when he joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman in the 1920s.

Another friend was the composer Edward Elgar . The latter dedicated one of his late works, Severn Suite, to Shaw; and Shaw exerted himself (eventually with success) to persuade the BBC to commission from Elgar a third symphony, though this piece remained incomplete at Elgar's death. Shaw's correspondence with the motion picture producer Gabriel Pascal , who was the first to bring Shaw's plays successfully to the screen and who later tried to put into motion a musical adaptation of Pygmalion, but died before he could realize it, is published in a book titled Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal., [60] A stage play by Hugh Whitemore , The Best of Friends, provides a window on the friendships of Dame Laurentia McLachlan , OSB (late Abbess of Stanbrook) with Sir Sydney Cockerell and Shaw through adaptations from their letters and writings. A television adaptation of the play, aired on PBS , starred John Gielgud as Cockerell, Wendy Hiller as Laurentia, and Patrick McGoohan as Shaw. It is available on DVD. Photography Edit Shaw bought his first camera in 1898 and was an active amateur photographer until his death in 1950.

Before 1898 Shaw had been an early supporter of photography as a serious art form. His non-fiction writing includes many reviews of photographic exhibitions such as those by his friend Alvin Langdon Coburn . The photographs document a prolific literary and political life – Shaw's friends, travels, politics, plays, films and home life. It also records his experiments with photography over 50 years and for the photographic historian provides a record of the development of the photographic and printing techniques available to the amateur photographer between 1898 and 1950. The collection is currently the subject of a major project, Man & Cameraman [61] which will allow online access to thousands of photos taken by Shaw.

Politics Edit In his will, Shaw stated that his "religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution." [85] He requested that no one should imply that he accepted the beliefs of any specific religious organization, and that no memorial to him should "take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice." [85] Recognition File:George Bernard Shaw Statue.jpg In his old age, Shaw was a household name both in Britain and Ireland, and was famed throughout the world. His ironic wit endowed English with the adjective "Shavian", used to characterize observations such as: "My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world." Concerned about the vagaries of English spelling, Shaw willed a portion of his wealth (probated at £367,233 13s) [86] to fund the creation of a new phonemic alphabet for the English language. [87] However, the money available was insufficient to support the project, so it was neglected for a time.

This changed when his estate began earning significant royalties from the rights to Pygmalion after My Fair Lady—the musical adapted from Pygmalion by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe —became a hit. However, the Public Trustee found the intended trust to be invalid because its intent was to serve a private interest instead of a charitable purpose, and as a non-charitable purpose trust, it could not be enforced because it failed to satisfy the beneficiary principle. [88] In the end an out-of-court settlement granted only £8600 for promoting the new alphabet, which is now called the Shavian alphabet . The National Gallery of Ireland , RADA and the British Museum all received substantial bequests. Shaw's home, now called Shaw's Corner , in the small village of Ayot St Lawrence , Hertfordshire is a National Trust property, open to the public. [89] The Shaw Theatre , Euston Road , London, opened in 1971, was named in his honour. [90] Near its entrance, opposite the new British Library , a contemporary statue of Saint Joan commemorates Shaw as author of that play.

The Shaw Festival , an annual theater festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake , Ontario, Canada began as an eight week run of Don Juan in Hell (as the long third act dream sequence of Man And Superman is called when staged alone) and Candida in 1962, and has grown into an annual festival with over 800 performances a year, dedicated to producing the works of Shaw and his contemporaries. The portrait of George Bernard Shaw located at Niagara-on-the-Lake was commissioned by hotelier Si Wai Lai and sculpted by Dr. Elizabeth Bradford Holbrook , CM (1913–2009). [91] [92] He is also remembered as one of the pivotal founders of the London School of Economics , whose library is now called the British Library of Political and Economic Science . The Fabian Window , designed by Shaw, hangs in the Shaw Library in the main building of the LSE. Publications Peters, Sally. “Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman”. Yale University Press , 1996 ISBN 978-0300060973 Rider, Dan. “Adventures with Bernard Shaw”.

Morley and Mitchell Kennerley Junior. Smith, J. Percy. “Unrepentant Pilgrim: A study of the development of Bernard Shaw”. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1965 Stone, Dan (2002). Breeding superman: Nietzsche, race and eugenics in Edwardian and interwar Britain. Liverpool, England: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 9780853239970 . Strauss, E. “Bernard Shaw: Art and Socialism”. Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1942 Weintraub, Stanley. “Bernard Shaw 1914–1918: Journey to Heartbreak”. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973 Weintraub, Stanley. “The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical approaches to G.B.S and his work”. Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1982 ISBN 080442974X West, Alick.

“A good man fallen among Fabians: A study of George Bernard Shaw” Lawrence and Wishart , 1974 ISBN 9780853152880 Watson, Barbara Bellow: “A Shavian Guide to the intelligent woman”. Chatto and Windus, 1964 Wilson, Colin . "Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment". Athenum, 1969. Winsten, Stephen. “Jesting Apostle: The Life of Bernard Shaw”. Hutchinson and Co Ltd, 1956 Winsten, Stephen. “Salt and his circle: With a preface by Bernard Shaw”. Hutchinson and Co Ltd, 1951 Notes

Question: In which decade did W B Yeats and G B Shaw win the Nobel Prize for Literature?
Answer: 1920S