Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 – November 30, 1900) is an Irish poet and playwright.

After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, the early 1890s see him become one of the most popular playwrights in London.

He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for "gross indecency", imprisonment, and early death at age forty-six.

Wilde's parents are successful Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin.

A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German.

At university, Wilde reads Greats; he demonstrates himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford.

He becomes associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin.

After university, Wilde moves to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tries his hand at various literary activities: he publishes a book of poems, lectures in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, then returns to London where he works prolifically as a journalist.

Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde becomes one of the best-known personalities of his day.

At the turn of the 1890s, he refines his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporates themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what will be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, draws Wilde to write drama.

He writes Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it is refused a license for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage.

Unperturbed, Wilde produces four society comedies in the early 1890s, which make him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is still being performed in London, Wilde has the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for criminal libel.

The Marquess is the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.

The libel trial unearths evidence that causes Wilde to drop his charges and leads to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men.

After two more trials he is convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labor, the maximum penalty, and is jailed from 1895 to 1897.

During his last year in prison, he writes De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure.

On his release, he leaves immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain.

There he writes his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

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