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Oscar Wilde

Born

in Dublin, Ireland

October 16, 1854

Died

November 30, 1900

Genre

Theatre, Poetry, Humor and Comedy, Fiction, Children's

Influences

Balzac, Walter Pater, Edgar Allan Poe, John Ruskin, Peter Kropotkin, L ...more

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Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and Joh Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. ...more

Combine Editions
Oscar Wilde’s books

Average rating: 4.12 · 2,906,799 ratings · 159,036 reviews · 5,475 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Robert Mighall (Introduction) 4.13 avg rating — 1,855,473 ratings — published 1890 — 666 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Importance of Being Earnest 4.17 avg rating — 403,996 ratings — published 1895 — 2951 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Canterville Ghost 3.88 avg rating — 70,456 ratings — published 1887 — 3355 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde, Richard Allen Cave (Editor) 4.23 avg rating — 51,842 ratings — published 1898 — 146 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	An Ideal Husband 4.01 avg rating — 44,497 ratings — published 1893 — 1887 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Happy Prince 4.19 avg rating — 37,679 ratings — published 1888 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Complete Fairy Tales 4.16 avg rating — 33,358 ratings — published 1888 — 3017 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	De Profundis 4.22 avg rating — 25,426 ratings — published 1897 — 1792 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Lady Windermere's Fan 3.92 avg rating — 27,054 ratings — published 1892 — 847 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast (Penguin Little Black Classics, #119) 3.92 avg rating — 21,461 ratings — published 2016 — 15 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Oscar Wilde…

Series by Oscar Wilde

Macmillan 1962 Series of Classic Fairy Stories (2 books)
by

Oscar Wilde,

John Updike (Introduced by),

Sandro Nardini (illustrator),

Enrico Bagnoli (illustrator)

3.81 avg rating — 31 ratings

In most historical romances, love and marriage go together like...well, a horse and carriage. But what if the girl part of the girl-meets-boy...

Polls

July 2014 Revisit the Shelf

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

40 votes, 18.2%

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

27 votes, 12.3%

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

24 votes, 10.9%

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest byKen Kesey

23 votes, 10.5%

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

19 votes, 8.6%

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

15 votes, 6.8%

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

15 votes, 6.8%

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

11 votes, 5.0%

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

9 votes, 4.1%

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

9 votes, 4.1%

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

8 votes, 3.6%

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

7 votes, 3.2%

Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace

6 votes, 2.7%

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

4 votes, 1.8%

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

3 votes, 1.4%

220 total votes

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