Oscar Wilde
1854–1900 8 entries
Biography
Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet, playwright and novelist, famous for his wit and his flamboyant style. Born in Dublin, he studied classics at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, where he became a leading voice of the aesthetic movement and its creed of art for art’s sake. In London he wrote fairy tales, essays and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890. His comedies of the early 1890s, crowned by The Importance of Being Earnest, made him the most celebrated playwright in the city.
At the height of his fame, in 1895, he was convicted of gross indecency because of his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas and sentenced to two years of hard labour. Prison broke his health and his fortune, and there he wrote the long letter later published as De Profundis. After his release he lived in exile in France, wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and died in Paris in 1900, at the age of forty-six.
- Aphorisms 8