George Bernard Shaw died at his home at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire on November 2, 1950, at the age of ninety-four, after a fall in the garden while he was pruning a tree. He had been born in Dublin in 1856 and had gone to London as a young man, where he wrote novels that nobody wanted and reviews and music criticism that paid the rent. He was poor for years. He began to write for the stage in the 1890s and went on working until the year of his death.
His plays were written to make an argument, and they took on slums and prostitution and the medical profession and marriage and war, and in doing so they changed what an audience in London would accept on a stage. The list is long. Arms and the Man and Candida and Major Barbara and Pygmalion and Saint Joan are among the best known, and Pygmalion was later turned into a musical that carried his story to a far larger public. He wrote the parts for the actors he wanted.
He joined the Fabian Society in 1884 and spent years speaking on street corners and writing pamphlets, and he helped to found the London School of Economics, and he argued for equal pay and for the reform of the alphabet and for simpler spelling. He also took positions that put him at odds with almost everyone, including praise for several dictators in the 1930s, and he turned down the money that came with the Nobel Prize. The record is mixed.
His marriage in 1898 lasted until the death of his wife in 1943, and it was a partnership with little of the romance that appears in his plays, and the two of them travelled and worked and kept the same house in the country. He kept his routine. He left most of his estate to causes and to the improvement of the language, and he was cremated and his ashes were scattered in the garden with those of his wife. He was still writing letters in his last week.