Oscar Wilde books

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Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and became the most celebrated wit of the Victorian era. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, where he embraced the aesthetic movement and built a reputation for brilliance, flamboyance, and sharp conversation. By the early 1890s he was the most talked-about writer in London.

His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was published in 1890 and scandalized critics with its themes of vanity, corruption, and hidden sin. The fairy tales he wrote for his sons, collected in The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates, are among the best in the English language. But it was his plays that made him wealthy: Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest ran to packed houses in the West End.

In 1895, Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labor. Prison broke his health and his finances. He wrote De Profundis, a long letter to his former lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and after release composed The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He died in Paris in 1900 at age 46. His work has never gone out of print, and his epigrams still circulate as if he said them yesterday.