George Bernard Shaw...

...was the correct response to today's Literary Quiz o' the Day. Good work by Jill Bender and Nicole Pike on their speedy Sunday morning responses :-) Here is a bit more on GBS:

It's the birthday of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin (1856). He's the author of dozens of plays, including Man and Superman (1905), Pygmalion (1912), and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938 for his film Pygmalion. He's the only person in history to receive both the Nobel and an Oscar.

He had a precise and peculiar morning ritual: According to friend and biographer Stephen Winsten, Shaw would awaken early every day, go to his sink and fill it with cold water, dip his whole face into the sink with his eyes open, splash his eyes with water seven times, and then blot his face dry with a soft bath towel. Shaw said that when he was a boy in Ireland, a peasant instructed him to do this, and he did it ever since. After his ritual washing every day, he opened up the newspaper and read the obituaries first, while eating a breakfast that did not vary from day to day.

He's considered to be the greatest English-language dramatist after Shakespeare. Even before he had written a masterpiece, Shaw was announcing this very comparison to people, and adding that he did some things in playwriting even better than Shakespeare did. Shaw knew all of the plays he had written by memory. He was also a prolific music critic and literary critic, and he's highly quotable. He liked to quote himself. He said, "My specialty is being right when other people are wrong."

He was a great letter-writer and kept up correspondences with many people, including the British actresses Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Ellen Terry, poet Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas and writer H.G. Wells. For 75 years, he averaged nine letters a day, every day. He was lifelong friends with G.K. Chesterton and composer Edgar Elgar.

He lived to be 94 years old, and then died not of natural causes, but from injuries after falling off a ladder while pruning trees.

Shaw wrote and said a great many memorable things, including:
"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That's the essence of inhumanity."

(Shaw biographical information courtesy of "The Writer's Almanac" from American Public Media)