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About the Author
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, Lady Jane Francesca Wilde, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.
After attending Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, in Northern Ireland, from 1864-1871, Wilde went to Trinity College in Dublin and Magdalen College in Oxford, the latter awarding him a degree with honors. While at Magdalen College, Wilde distinguished himself not only as a classical scholar but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with the poem RAVENNA.
In the early 1880s, when aestheticism, or art for art's sake, was the rage of literary circles in London, Wilde established himself with his flamboyance and incredible wit. Eager for acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival in New York City that he had "nothing to declare but his genius." Wilde urged the Americans to love beauty and art, and a year later he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his experience and his impressions of America.
Wilde married Constance Lloyd in 1884. The couple had two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, in 1885 and 1886. Wilde worked as a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of WOMAN'S WORLD (1887-1889). During this period he published THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES (1888).
Wilde wrote and published almost all of his major work in the last decade of his life. In his only novel, THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (published in LIPPINCOTT'S MAGAZINE, 1890), Wilde depicted society's fascination with youth and beauty. When critics charged that the book was scandalous and immoral, despite the title character's eventual self-destruction, Wilde revised his work, adding a preface and six chapters, and had it published in book form in 1891. INTENTIONS, also published in 1891, consisting of previously published essays, further reveals the author's aesthetic attitude toward art. In the same year, he also published two volumes of stories and fairy tales, LORD ARTHUR SAVILE'S CRIME AND OTHER STORIES and A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES, testifying to the extent of Wilde's extraordinary creative genius.
With a string of highly successful plays, including LADY WINDERMER'S FAN (1892), SALOME (1892), A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (1893), and AN IDEAL HUSBAND (1895), Wilde burst onto the literary scene in the middle of the decade. His last play, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1895), is considered his greatest.
In many of Wilde's works, the plot revolves around the exposure of a character's secret sin or indiscretion and the disgrace that this ultimately causes. If life imitates art, Wilde was himself modeling one of his characters in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. His close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated Douglass's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. When the marquess accused Wilde of sodomy, Wilde, never one to back down from a fight, sued for criminal libel. Wilde's case collapsed, however, when the evidence turned against him, and he had to drop the suit. Although his friends urged him to flee France, Wilde refused and was arrested. After a sensational trial, he was sentenced, in May 1895, to two years' hard labor for homosexual practices. Most of his sentence was served a reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Lard Douglas, published in a shortened form in 1905 as DE PROFUNDIS.
In May 1897 Wilde was released from prison, bankrupt, and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate his career as a writer. He only produced one more work, THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL (1898), which expressed his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Wilde died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection, on November 20, 1900, in Paris.
