It was his play about Joan of Arc, Saint Joan (1923), written in the year of her canonization, that had swayed the Nobel Committee, as they managed to look past Shaw as the author of Pygmalion, Man and Superman and Major Barbara. When Shaw received the award, he was almost 70 years old.
“I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite,” Shaw commented, “but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.” He did not attend the award ceremony or other celebrations, nor did he accept the money. Shaw was about as enthusiastic about the award as Samuel Beckett was over 40 years later. Highlighted at the award ceremony was “his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty.” George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was the second Irish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded to him two years after William Butler Yeats, in 1925. The 1914 Broadway production of Pygmalion / Stage Publishing Company, Inc.
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