Oscar Wilde
Irish writer, 1854–1900 — the wittiest man of his age, and its most famous casualty.
The life
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 and educated at Trinity College and then Oxford, where he took a double first and began assembling the public persona that would make him famous long before his best work existed. He arrived in London as an apostle of Aestheticism — art for art’s sake, beauty as its own justification — and turned himself into a figure the newspapers could not ignore: the epigrams, the dress, the lecture tour of America, the talent for being quoted.
The work, when it came, came quickly. Fairy tales, criticism, one novel, and then the run of comedies — Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest — that remain the most durable comic writing in English since Sheridan. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, appeared in 1890 and scandalized reviewers who read it, correctly, as a book unwilling to pretend that beauty and morality are the same thing.
In 1895, at the height of his success, Wilde sued his lover’s father for libel, lost, and was prosecuted under the laws then criminalizing homosexuality. He served two years’ hard labor at Reading Gaol, emerged broken in health and bankrupt, and died in Paris in 1900, aged forty-six. The wit has survived the scandal, but Dorian Gray reads differently once you know what came after: a book about a man who thinks the reckoning can be locked in an attic, written by one who found it could not.
More on Wilde at Wikipedia.
