also on July 26

George Bernard Shaw was born on this date in 1856. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Academy Award, for Pygmalion, in 1938. Not too shabby for a simple country boy from a poor Irish family. Shaw only died on November 2, 1950. His work is still widely known, still borrowed from, and still in print. I was really rather surprised to discover that he had been born so terribly long ago. Then again, to some people, 1950 seems unimaginably long ago, so who’s to say?